An Analysis of Audiovisual Subtitling Translation Focusing on Wordplays from English into Persian in the Friends TV Series

Translation of humor and transferring its effect is one of the most challenging tasks of a translator due to the cultural clashes between the source language (SL) and the target language (TL). Accordingly, the present study aimed to specify the most frequently applied strategies in terms of Delabastita’s wordplay model used in SL and their translation strategy by Persian translators according to Gottlieb’s theory. To do so, the wordplay samples were gathered by analyzing the Persian subtitles of the Friends TV series. Next, each translation version was compared with its English version based on Delabastita's model and Gottlieb's translation strategies to see if they had been applied. The results showed that 4% of wordplays in Friends were based on homography and 38.66% on homonymy while paronymy accounted for 60% of the data thus being the most frequently used wordplay strategy proposed by Delabatista. The results also indicated that 78.66% of wordplays were translated based on replacing strategy (the most frequently used strategy), 12% adapting strategy, 0% inserting, while 9.33% of them were left untranslated (not rendering strategy) in terms of Gottlieb’s translation strategy.