ElevenLabs Voice Cloning: Investigating the Transfer of Egyptian Humor Into English-Dubbed Instagram Reels

The study investigates the efficiency of ElevenLabs voice cloning software in dubbing Egyptian humor in Instagram reels into English. Furthermore, it aims at examining how the replication of tonal pitch nuances and original actors’ voices influence the translatability of humor into the target language. To examine the transfer of cultural and pragmatic aspects of humor, the study conducts multi-layer analysis for eight reels by adopting a multi-modal framework including Martínez-Sierra taxonomy of humorous elements and Juckel et al. typology of humor techniques. In terms of the preservation of the influence of prosodic cues on humor, an acoustic analysis was conducted for both of the source and target audios using Praat . Two questionnaires were designed to examine viewers’ perceptions toward using voice cloning as a dubbing tool to dub humor, oriented toward two participant groups: native English speakers and Arabic-English bilinguals. It revealed that voice cloning is more efficient in enhancing the tonal consistency in dubbing, particularly in conveying Egyptian performed humor into English compared to conventional dubbing and subtitling. However, further improvements are needed in terms of voice naturality and accuracy in transferring cultural aspects of humor. The analysis also sheds light on translation challenges regarding cultural and linguistic nuances in humor translation.