Creative Subtitling of Humor in Arabic: A Case Study of Friends Series

Abstract

The subtitling of humor presents a significant challenge in audiovisual translation as it demands of the translator both linguistic skills and cultural understanding of the language pair involved. This study aimed to (i) identify the obstacles that translators encounter in the translation of humor in Friends into Arabic, and, (ii) the strategies used to accommodate the target viewers' cultural sensibilities. Nida’s framework was employed in this study to examine the subtitles. The dataset comprised a corpus of popular scenes whose humorous content was classified and the subtitles were evaluated by professional translators to identify problem areas and examine the efficacy of translation strategies used in the subtitles. The findings indicated that situational and character-based humor was mostly transferred successfully across languages while linguistic humor and culture-specific jokes could not be rendered as effortlessly. The study concluded with the observation that effective subtitling depends on flexible strategy selection while keeping in mind functional adequacy and cultural sensitivity of the audience. The psychological reaction of the viewers to the humor was measured using a structured rubric that was applied by three certified Arabic-English translators who have 5 to 10 years of experience in audiovisual translation to determine whether the humor was likely to be humorous to the Saudi viewers.