Translation strategies of humor in subtitling with special reference to the English movie Johnny English Strikes Again

Abstract

Audiovisual translation, particularly subtitling, draws the attention of a number of scholars. However, the translation of humor in subtitles is a challenging task as humor includes a broad collection of cultural and linguistic expressions. The present study is an attempt to investigate the translation strategies of subtitling humor into Sinhalese, determine to what extent the translation strategies have been utilized, and to compare the different strategies utilized by the different subtitlers in order to convert the humor into Sinhalese. The study focused primarily on the Zabalbeascoa's categorization of humor to identify the subtitles which carry humor. The movie Johnny English Strikes Again form the corpus of the study. The study was carried out based on Gottlieb’s categorization of subtitling strategies to determine the translation strategies employed by subtitlers. Two Sinhalese subtitles scripts provided by two different subtitlers have been used to find out the translation strategies. This research examines the strategies adopted by the subtitlers by comparing the segments of the Source Text and the equivalent of the Target Text. The results of the study show that the most common translation strategies adopted by translators in subtitling humor from English into Sinhalese are “transfer”, followed by “paraphrase”. Such use of subtitling strategies suggests that the translation is assisted by the simplicity of the Source Language and the non-verbal cues of the actions.