A Functionalist Approach to Dubbing into Arabic – Bilal: A New Breed of Hero as a Case Study

The world is more connected now than ever due to globalization and digitalization efforts, which means that translators are faced with an increased chance of the occurrence of ideological manipulation. Ideological manipulation is strongly integrated into audiovisual translation (AVT) given its complex nature. This research investigates the religious ideological manipulation which occurred in the two versions of the movie Bilal: A New Breed of Hero, each telling the same yet different story. Leaning on the functionalist approach and the Skopos Theory is specific, the results showed differences between the two versions of the movie were attributed to the difference in the religious message and the target audience. The English version lacked all attributes of religious references, some of which were proper names which were strongly connected to the Islamic religion.