multilingual movies dubbed in iran: preserving the local color or adding humor?

The growth of globalization has led to a modern cinematic world that would depict more than one language. dubbing multilingual movies is in fact a demanding and challenging task. strategizing and prioritizing the solutions in translating and dubbing multilingualism in iran have been receiving attention from several researchers. this involved asking what rather than why. in this study, we are more interested in seeking answers to the following question: “why is the third language (l3) persevered in persian dubbing?” to find the reasons behind preserving l3, 184 l3 segments in two multilingual animations and their persian dubbed versions, coco (2017) and luca (2021), were extracted and transcribed. then the data was analyzed based on minutella’s (2021) framework on analyzing multilingual movies to discern whether the dubbing director maintains l3 to add a humorous effect, or to showcase the otherness and respect the originality of the culture presented by l3. the results of data analysis showed that the third language was preserved primarily to add or enhance the humoristic effect of the utterance. in doing so, however, the local color of the foreign setting in the original movie was to some extent preserved as well. this study suggests that in persian dubbing, the third language is preserved to not only leave a trace of the otherness or local color, but also to add humor and amusement to the dubbed version. this finding is also in line with that of minutella’s (2021) study on italian dubbings of animations.