Renarration of the Verbal and Nonverbal Sites in the Multimodal Narrative: A Case of Animations Dubbed from English into Persian

With the many advances in media communication that have revolutionalized our ways of constructing meaning over the last decades, the existing approaches towards audiovisual translation that consider it as a kind of verbal transfer from one language to another seem to work to a point and hence leave a great gap as to what exactly is entailed in audiovisual texts that participate in constructing reality in the target language. The present study drawing on Ghomi and Farahzad’s (2020) model of renarration in audiovisual translation explores the renarration of the verbal and nonverbal sites in the multimodal narrative with a focus on dubbed animations broadcast from the Islamic Republic of Iran Broadcasting. To this end, the study applied Multimodal Narrative Analysis introduced by Ghomi and Farahzad (2020) as the research methodology to see which sites are tampered with in the process of constructing reality in the IRIB’s narrative. The results of the study suggested that the IRIB exploits all narrative sites in the process of multimodal renarration and transcends the mere translation of written words, bringing into the equation other multimodal elements such as image and vocal behavior that make up a multimodal product. It further revealed that nonverbal sites were reframed more than verbal sites in order to accentuate, undermine or modify certain narratives in the target language.