Microstrategies Employed for Translation of English Humor Subtitled into Persian: A Case Study of The Simpsons Movie

Abstract

Humor is a universal concept. It is widely used in many different forms of literature. It is not surprising then, that in translation practice, the translator often comes across this phenomenon. This study was an attempt to identify the strategies employed to translate United States’ humor into Persian subtitle in a comic genre, and to determine their frequency, as well. Based on Ross’s (1998) classification of humor and Gottlieb's (1997) microstrategies, this study examined The Simpsons Movie. The results indicated that the most frequently used strategy was “transfer” and the least frequently used strategies were “decimation”, "deletion", "imitation", "resignation" and "substitution". The results of the study were in line with Gottlieb’s (1992) finding, who found by using strategies 1-5 (expansion, paraphrase, transfer, imitation and condensation) we get a more or less adequate rendering of the source text material into the target language, whereas strategies 6-8 (decimation, deletion and resignation) involve some degree of semantic and stylistic loss.