Lost in Translation or Getting the Joke? A Comparative Study of Dubbing and Subtitling Humor in English Movies on an Iranian VOD Platform
Maryam Pour Sadri
1
(
English Language Department, Ershad Damavand University, Tehran, Iran
)
Narges Sardabi
2
(
English Language Department, Ershad Damavand University, Tehran, Iran
)
Amir Ghajarieh
3
(
English Language Department, Ershad Damavand University, Tehran, Iran
)
Keywords: Audiovisual Translation, Dubbing, Humor, Subtitling, VOD,
Abstract :
This paper aims to investigate the strategies utilized by translators in translating humor from English into Persian in dubbed and subtitled movies. To achieve this goal, a corpus consisting of 9 reference comedy movies and their corresponding dubbed and subtitled translations in Persian were selected from the Iranian VOD platform, Filimo. The present study is a mixed-methods research that adopts a quantitative-qualitative approach to analyze the strategies used in translating humor from English into Persian in dubbed and subtitled movies on Filimo. The analysis is based on a corpus of 9 reference comedy movies, and a total of 100 instances of humor were selected and analyzed using Marta Mateo's (1995) humor model. The results were interpreted through frequency counts, and a comparison was made between the strategies used in dubbing and subtitling. Based on the results, it appears that the most commonly used strategies for translating humor in both dubbing and subtitling are literal translation and equivalent effect, which were used in approximately 60 percent of the instances. This suggests that these strategies are preferred by translators in rendering humor in English movies into Persian. However, one of the main findings of the study is that some of Mateo's (1995) strategies for translating humor were not applied at all, and in some cases, they were consistently ignored. This suggests that there may be limitations to the existing strategies for translating humor and that further research is needed to explore more effective and comprehensive strategies for translating humor in audiovisual media.