The present study investigates the English subtitles of Arabic humorous expressions in three Egyptian movies. The corpus consists of 100 Arabic examples that belong to six genres of humour: irony, swearing, wordplay, pun, parody, and ellipsis. The contextualized humorous Arabic examples are juxtaposed against the English counterpart subtitles to quantitatively and qualitatively analyse them. The findings show that paraphrase is the most frequent translation strategy used to render humorous expressions (36%), followed by literal translation (33%), and cultural substitution (17%), in addition to a few combined strategies, which together account for (14%). Regarding humour genre’s sensitivity to translation strategies, the findings offer two significant findings. First, literal translation and paraphrase dominate in rendering irony, while cultural substitution dominates in swearing expressions. This simply means that irony can semantically travel from one language to another by attending to the literal meaning of what is said or by paraphrasing/rewording culture-bound elements, whereas swearing expressions are culture-specific and idiomatic in terms of content and form, which renders them resistant to literal translation and paraphrase. Second, the creation of humour through language manipulation (wordplay, pun, and parody) is the most demanding and often vulnerable to loss, mainly through paraphrase. The critical discussion shows that the impact of humour in these genres is mostly lost in English, despite the fact that it can be salvaged by creative cultural substitution in most cases.
Farghal et al. (Tue,) studied this question.