Domestication and Foreignisation in Dubbing and Subtitling of Duncan Jones’ English Movie Warcraft into Persian

The present paper studies diverse procedures related to Venuti‟s strategies of domestication and foreignisation in Farsi dubbing and subtitling of the English movie, Warcraft directed by Duncan Jones. The procedures of both domestication and foreignisation were studied and statically analysed for the purpose of exploring the film translation method (dubbing or subtitling) which is closer to targetlanguage-culture and the one which is closer to source-language-culture. In other words it was intended to explore which translation strategy (domestication or foreignisation) dominates dubbing and which one dominates subtitling. The tertiary purpose was to compare the reasons of differences in dubbing versus subtitling on the one hand, and the reasons of differences of the target text from the source text. The statistical analysis revealed that in dubbing, cultural equivalence is the most frequently used procedure (38.26%) apparently for making the movie visible for the public Iranian audience and adjust the movie to cultural considerations. Henceforth, dubbing orients to domestication. However, subtitling, with literal translation as the most frequently used procedure (57.4%), orients to foreignisation. In dubbing of the movie, most differences are related to cultural equivalence (38.26%) and the literal translation (29.56%) is in the next step. An interesting point is that the procedure of calque is neither used in subtitling nor in dubbing. In subtitling, cultural equivalence stands in the second place (17.34) and explanation (9.50%) occupies the third place. Other procedures‟ frequencies show no meaningful difference. Once implemented on more cases, the findings of this study have the potentialities of generalization to identify the most frequently occurred errors in movie translation industry and henceforth suggesting translation solutions for rendering dubbing and subtitling with more degree of naturalness