The feasibility and strategies of humour effect through translation in subtitling: A case study of the American sitcom 'Friends' in terms of humour elements from English to Turkish

This study aims to investigate the subtitle translation strategies used to approach cultural and linguistic aspects in the translation of humour between English and Turkish in an audiovisual context by means of qualitative and quantitative analysis. The corpus of the study was the Turkish-subtitled version American popular sitcom "Friends" (2004). The data was collected by watching randomly chosen 2 episodes from 9 seasons. The analysis consisted of an in-depth comparison of each humorous source text segment with its corresponding translation and was performed by means of humour charts, in which a taxonomy of humour categories Patrick Zabalbeascoa (1993 and 1996) and elaborated by Juan José Martínez-Sierra, and Gottlieb (1992)'s subtitle translation strategies. The types of humour identified in the series were Community-and-Institutions Elements, Community-Sense-of-Humour Elements, Linguistic Elements, Visual Elements, Graphic Elements, Paralinguistic Elements, Non-Marked (Humorous) Elements, and Sound Elements. The results revealed that the most used type of humour was non-marked (humorous) elements, and the most used translation strategy was the transfer. Key Words: Translating Humour, Translating Jokes, Subtitle Humour, Audiovisual Humour, Audiovisual Translation