This study examines the dubbing translation strategies used in the Korean version of the Chinese animated film Boonie Bears: To the Rescue, with a particular focus on how these strategies reflect the characteristics and needs of child audiences. While...
This study examines the dubbing translation strategies used in the Korean version of the Chinese animated film Boonie Bears: To the Rescue, with a particular focus on how these strategies reflect the characteristics and needs of child audiences. While research on audiovisual translation has expanded in recent decades, Korean-language studies on dubbing—especially those addressing Chinese-to-Korean animation—remain limited. To fill this gap, this research applies Skopos Theory as its primary theoretical framework to analyze the functional and communicative features of dubbing translation.
The study begins by reviewing previous scholarship on dubbing translation, synchronization, and functionalist approaches, highlighting the importance of lip-sync, isochrony, kinesic synchrony, and cultural adaptation in ensuring the naturalness and acceptability of dubbed dialogue. It then conducts a comparative analysis of the original Chinese dialogue and the Korean dubbed version, focusing on cases involving semantic modification, addition, omission, or adaptation. Particular attention is given to how these changes interact with visual cues such as facial expressions, gestures, and physical movements.
Findings demonstrate that the Korean dubbed version employs diverse translation strategies—including expansion, reduction, domestication, and rewriting—to meet the communicative purpose of entertaining and educating young viewers. Synchronization requirements significantly influence linguistic choices, while cultural and cognitive considerations for child audiences lead to simplified expressions, explicit meanings, increased use of onomatopoeia, and localized humor. The study concludes that Skopos Theory provides a useful framework for understanding the functional motivations behind dubbing translation decisions in children’s animation and offers implications for future audiovisual translation research involving cross-cultural content.