Musical, visual and verbal aspects of animated film song dubbing: Testing the triangle of aspects model on Disney’s Frozen

Abstract

Although the dubbing of animated musical film songs has not been studied much in translation studies, it is important to do so: such films constitute a globally popular audiovisual media genre and are usually dubbed even in traditional subtitling countries. The songs from such films are complex, multimodal products that involve many different constraints. To facilitate research into this area, this dissertation aims to establish a methodology to study the differences between the original-language versions of songs and their dubbed counterparts. This results in a model of analysis, the triangle of aspects, which allows researchers to study the musical, visual, and verbal aspects that are involved in dubbing a song. This model is tested and further developed in four case studies, in which the original, English-language songs from the 2013 Disney film Frozen are compared to the Dutch dubbed versions. These case studies investigate the differences between the two versions concerning 1) the characterisation of two of the film’s characters, 2) the perceived skopos or focus of the dubbed product, 3) the theme of love versus fear in the songs, and 4) the theme of isolation in one of the songs, ‘Let it go’, in both the Dutch-language version released in the Netherlands and the Dutch-language version released in Belgium. Of these, the first two have a relatively general nature while the last two are more specific to the material itself. The findings show that the characterisation and themes investigated seem to be more straightforward and unambiguous in the dubbed versions, but also developed and integrated less strongly with the musical and visual codes. In addition, the Netherlands version assumes a relatively musicocentric approach whereas the Belgian version is more logocentric. These case studies are valuable tools to test the triangle of aspects. The model presented here comprises the ten aspects of rhyme, rhythm, singability, harmony, synchrony, visual deixis, imagery, sense, style, and mood. The first four are musical in nature; the following three visual; and the last three are verbal in nature. These aspects offer concrete variables for the identification of differences, as well as ways to expand or reduce the role of the aspects for certain research purposes. It is hoped that the triangle of aspects and the case studies presented here stimulate further research into the genre of animated musical film song dubbing.