An Analysis of English Subtitling of Humorous Expressions of Persian Comedy Series

This article investigates the extent of translation strategies which employed in the subtitling of Persiancomedy series into English. The corpus consists of the humorous expressions collected from the first fourparts of popular Persian comedy Serial, named Capital 1 . The analysis is based on the comparison ofhumorous expressions of the Persian dialogues with their English Subtitles which broadcasted from Jame-Jam TV network. Compared humorous expressions are classified into ten groups according to Gottlieb’s(1992) classification of subtitling. Twenty-five humorous expressions were detected from the analyzing of thePersian humorous expressions with their English subtitles. The finding revealed that Paraphrase strategyis the most frequently used strategy and deletion and decimation are the least frequently used strategies. Imitation, condensation, dislocation and transcription are four strategies which have no frequencyin the study. The high frequency of paraphrase reveals this fact that since most of the humorousexpressions of Persian comedy series are colloquial expressions or idiom and have no exact equivalence inthe target language, the translator decides to use paraphrase strategy and employs an expression whichhas the nearest meaning to the original dialogue.

Keywords:

Translation , audiovisual translation (AVT) , subtitling , humor