Compensation in Translating Phonic and Prosodic Features of Dubbed Animation Songs into Modern Standard Arabic: the Case of Anastasia's Songs

This study tackled the issue of dubbing animation songs from English into Modern Standard Arabic. It depicted how the phonic and prosodic features together with their thematic value were transferred into the target song. The analysis of two songs from the animation ‘Anastasia’ revealed that balanced translation method was the dominant strategy followed in dubbing animated musical movies’ songs into Modern Standard Arabic. In fact, dubbing animation songs from English into Arabic was feasible without compromising the meaning for the sake of form or vice versa. This was possible through the use of different compensation strategies: compensation in kind, compensation in place, compensation by splitting and compensation by visuals. In other words, when form and meaning were interrelated, we did not approach a situation of untranslatability.