Playing with Words Across Visual Humor:

Exploring Translanguaging Practices in a Bilingual University Context

Abstract

This research focuses on the intersection of translanguaging, language instruction, and audiovisual materials, with a specific focus on wordplay in Translation Studies. Given the significant role, wordplay plays in generating humor in audiovisual materials, it can provide a challenge for translators to convey both the humor and cultural nuances of the original text. The study initially analyzed the strategies utilized in subtitling wordplay for two popular series, Friends and The Simpsons, translated into Persian. The research utilized a content analysis approach to categorize the diverse types of wordplay and identify the particular translation methods employed in the subtitle translations. The results indicated that lexical-semantic wordplay and "no wordplay" approaches were the most commonly utilized strategies. However, the failure of translated subtitles was observed due to inadequate transfer of English wordplay into Persian. Subsequently, the study's findings were shared with 15 EFL students. The focus group results demonstrated the participants' enhanced understanding of wordplay, with translanguaging identified as a motivating approach for language learning. To assess the naturalness of equivalents in the subtitled series, the study enlisted views from three Persian native speakers regarding selected equivalents in the corpus. This research has important implications for agencies in multilingual and multicultural spaces.