Translatability of Metaphors in the Dubbing of Animation Songs from English into the Egyptian Dialect

This research paper examined the ways how translators translated metaphors in the dubbing of
animation songs and measured the degree of loss occurred in rendering metaphors from English into
Arabic; these two languages are culturally and linguistically distinct languages. This study employed
descriptive qualitative methods. The data used in this research were metaphors of songs from three
animated musical movies: Beauty and the Beast, Tangled, and Pocahontas. This paper analyzed the
translation of metaphors depending on the cognitive theory proposed by Mandelblit (1995). The results
proved that even though translating metaphors in animation songs was a laborious process, they did not
always cause a problem of untranslatability; on the contrary, translators can render metaphors from
English onto Arabic without a significant loss in terms of meaning and sound patterns. Compensation in
kind and compensation in place helped to achieve the translatability of metaphors in cartoon films’ songs.
The analysis of source and target metaphors revealed that there were three translation procedures used
to translate metaphors in animation songs, namely: replacing the source metaphor with a target metaphor
(substitution), translating the metaphor into sense (paraphrasing), and using literal translation.