“Chicks Love it” “It’s not Ha-wee-wee”: Subtitling Strategies in Translation of Humor from English into Persian

Abstract

The purpose of the present study was to investigate the approaches and strategies employed by Iranian subtitlers in the translation of humor from English into Persian. It further aimed at investigating the extent to which these concepts are translatable. The data for the purpose of this study included four subtitled movies selected among those originally produced in English and subtitled to Persian. In order to have a contrastive analysis of humors and their translations, the movies dialogues and their subtitles were compared and contrasted. Based on the definitions of the concept of humor, humorous elements were singled out from each movie and their corresponding subtitled translations were identified and juxtaposed. Analyzing and contrasting the extracted data, approaches and strategies employed by Iranian subtitlers in dealing with these humorous elements were investigated. Findings revealed that translators relied on eight different strategies in translating humorous concepts. The strategies employed were namely transfer, paraphrase, localization, addition, deletion, transliteration, preservation and creation. The study concludes with some socio-cultural and linguistic obstacles in humor translation. Much of the translated humors lacked effective sense and in some cases the sense of the main message in the source language was omitted.

DOI: 10.5901/mjss.2016.v7n4p593