Lost in Translation or Getting the Joke? A Comparative Study of Dubbing and Subtitling Humor in English Movies on an Iranian VOD Platform
Subject Areas :Narges Sardabi 1 , Amir Ghajarieh 2 , Maryam Poursadri 3
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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 translat-ing humor from English into Persian in dubbed and subtitled movies on Filimo. In this study, 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 be-tween 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 transla-tion 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 consistent-ly 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 strate-gies for translating humor in audiovisual media.
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Sadeghpour, H. R., & Omar, H. C. (2015). Humor translation in Persian subtitled comedy movies into English: A case study of ‘lizard’. Theory and Practice in Language Studies, 5(10), 1995–2002. https://doi.org/10.17507/tpls.0510.04
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Shamsaeefard, M., Falahati Qadimi Fumani, M. R., & Nemati, A. (2013). Strate-gies for translation of similes in four different Persian translations of Ham-let. Linguistics and Literature Studies, 1(3), 164–168. https://doi.org/10.13189/lls.2013.010306
Teddlie, C., & Tashakkori, A. (2009). Foundations of mixed methods re-search: Integrating quantitative and qualitative approaches in the social and behavioral sciences. Sage.
Toury, G. (2004). The nature and role of norms in translation. In L. Venuti (Ed.), The translation studies reader (2nd ed., pp. 205–217). Routledge.
Uras Yılmaz, A., & Çakıroğlu, K. (2021). Subtitling humor in the series “The Big Bang Theory.” İstanbul Üniversi-tesi Çeviribilim Dergisi / I.U. Journal of Translation Studies. https://doi.org/10.26650/iujts.2020.13.0002
Zolczer, P. (2016). Translating humour in audiovisual media. European Journal of Humour Research, 4(1), 76–92. https://doi.org/10.7592/ejhr2016.4.1.zolczer
