Humor Translation in Persian Dubbing of an American Animation “The Boss Baby”: Investigating Translation Strategies in Two Different Reception Environments

Translating verbal humor in audiovisual texts poses a serious challenge to translators, so this study investigated the nature of challenges which affect the translation of humor. For this purpose, the translators’ perception of humorous expressions from fourteen episodes of an animated comedy entitled “The Boss Baby” were identified and the selected expressions were compared to their dubbings conducted by Nahal and Gem Junior channels and the translation strategies were analyzed, then the impact of the reception environment and the reasons for using each strategy were investigated. The frequency and percentage of strategies applied were calculated and the findings revealed that while literal translation was the most frequently used strategy in Gem Junior channel, substitution and omission were the dominant strategies used in the other one. Nahal channel naturally rendered the dialogues in a way which is familiar to the Iranian children’s culture; therefore, it’s translation was target-oriented. On the other hand, Gem Junior channel's translation opted for a method which was between domestication and foreignization. Finally, the results showed that the tra