Exploring the Attitudes and Expectations of Iranian Audiences in Terms of Professional Dubbing into Persian

Abstract

For more than seven decades, dubbing has been the dominant professional modality for overcoming language barriers in foreign movies and TV series in Iran and has been revered as a national art. Although limited, some recent work has explored Persian dubbing reception and to continue this endeavor, this study attempts to offer further insights into how the Iranian viewers perceive dubbing, translation for dubbing and what they expect from dubbing. More precisely, the study aims at examining how the Iranian audiences view dubbing and particularly its agents and translation. To these ends, a questionnaire including open and closed items was designed. The overall results revealed that translation quality was considered considerably less important than the technical issues related to the dubbing production, such as voice-acting and synchronization. The findings also suggested that the performance of dubbing actors and dubbing directors was regarded more important than the contribution of translators. Overall, these findings seemed to indicate that the Iranian viewers’ appreciation of a dubbed program is mainly guided by non-translation issues including the performance of the dubbing actors and the accuracy of the relevant synchronizations.