Humor Translation in Persian Subtitled Comedy Movies into English: A Case Study of ‘Lizard’

Abstract

The aim of the present study is to investigate translation strategies employed in the subtitling of Persian comedy movies into English. The movie, titled 'Lizard' was chosen as the corpus of the study. Humorous instances are detected and identified in Persian version and they are classified into three groups according to Debra and Raphaelson-West's (1989) categorization of humor. The eight strategies for translation of cultural jokes proposed by Tomaszkiewicz (1993, cited in Diaz- Cintas, 2009) was adopted for the framework of the study to analyze the strategies employed in rendering the humorous expressions in subtitling of Persian comedy movies into English. The findings revealed that universal jokes can be transferred easily into other language/s whereas linguistic and cultural jokes resist in translation due to the differences between languages and cultures. Based on the findings of the study, literal translation is found to be the most commonly used technique in subtitling from Persian to English. Besides literal translation, equivalence strategy was also used in many cases. This study also suggests that in order to transfer cultural jokes, it is wiser to create humor in accordance to the visual context of the movie and domesticate the translation to achieve the desired result.