An Intersemiotic Analysis of the Arabic Dubbed Version of Disney’s Frozen Let it Go

Abstract

In today’s digital environment, verbal, visual and sound resources constantly collaborate to construct meaning in the audiovisual mediascape. Audiovisual Translation (AVT) studies have thus shifted focus to examine how such multimodal orchestration and meaning shifts are captured and transferred from one culture to another. Songs’ AVT in animated musicals imposes (non)verbal constraints on translators who have to adapt/adjust to transfer not only the verbal and visual codes but also the musical. This article examines the intersemiotic relations among the three different semiotic modes when dubbing Let it Go from English into Arabic. It builds on Reus’ (2020a/b) Triangle of Aspects to fit both academic and practical purposes. The results suggest that dubbing a song mainly relies on a quadrangular of parameters: meaning-making, technical, interpretative, and performative elements of translation. Verbally, the findings indicated that the translator oscillated between full adherence to disregard of the semantic meaning. Nonverbally, the findings revealed mixed results regarding the OS-DS (in)congruencies in which the translator foregrounded and/or backgrounded certain aspects to conform to imposed constraints. Four different intermodal relations were identified: addition, enhancement, modification, and deletion. This study offers a methodological contribution to the AVT scholarship, positing a framework that can be systematically followed in future research.