Translating Humour and Sarcasm in Movies from English to Arabic

Abstract

This research investigates the process of subtitling humour and sarcasm in animated movies, exploring the different translation methods and techniques used to translate them from English into Arabic, while the main concern is to convey the comedic elements across linguistic and cultural boundaries between the source language and the target language. This research adopts a descriptive analytic approach through analyzing several scripts and examining their effectiveness in the target language in the animated movie “Shrek”. This study is devided into three chapters; the first is theoretical, it contains two sections, the first represents an introduction to translation, translation methods, and an overview of the field of audiovisual translation, along with the challenges that face translators with such materials. The second section introduces the genre of animated movies. The second chapter is a comparison between the two concepts of humour and sarcasm and how these language elements are translated. The third and last chapter is practical, it is a descriptive analysis of extracted humorous scripts of the animated movie “Shrek”. This study aims to explore the different translation techniques and methods used in the subtitled arabic version of the movie. As a result, it is concluded that the translator followed the semantic translation method of Newmark(1981) in the majority of the humorous utterances, the success and effectiveness of the humour transferring is obviously achieved through the use of multiple translation techniques with the literal being the predominant. Finally, I proposed some recommandations for future translators of this genre.