PERTANIKA JOURNAL OF SOCIAL SCIENCES AND HUMANITIES

Audiovisual translation, especially subtitling, attracts the attention of many scholars. However, the translation of Persian subtitles is scarce. Translation of cultural differences is even more difficult when an animation has to convey the interesting parts such as humour that includes a broad collection of cultural and linguistic expressions. The present study attempts to investigate the translation strategies of humour in subtitles into Persian and determine the extent each translation strategies are utilised. The study focused on personification-based animation subtitles and primarily on three types of humour -universal, cultural and linguistic- from Schmitz’s categorisation of humour. Sixteen animations form the corpus of the study. The study was carried out based on Gottlieb’s classification of subtitling strategies to determine the translation strategies employed by subtitlers. This descriptive research examined the transferring strategies employed by the subtitler by comparing the segments of the source text and the equivalent of the target text. The outcomes of the study indicate that the most common translation strategies applied by translators in the subtitling of animation comedies from English into Persian are “transfer”, following by “paraphrase”, and the less common translation strategies are “deletion” and “resignation”. Such usage suggests that the translation is aided by the simplicity of the source language and the non-verbal elements of the animation.