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
Highlights
Language as we know it is a communication tool
The present study examines the Persian subtitles of four American movies: Night Run, Hotel Transylvania, Dumb and Dumber, and How I Met Your Mother, with particular focus on the humor segments
The study is primarily qualitative and involved an analysis of subtitles which was based on screen translation theories and the work of researchers in the area of humor translation
Summary
Language as we know it is a communication tool. There are some factors involved for a successful communication one of which is understanding the message. Just as we need to know the message for a successful communication, there is the need to about the culture. There is an interconnection among language, message and culture. Humor is one of the interesting tools which people rely upon for a more meaningful, effective and fun way to convey their messages. Linguistic, cultural and social elements are of great importance in humor. One needs to know a great deal of these elements which are often believed to be untranslatable. One area in which humor is greatly applied for practical purposes is mass media
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