• Mahsa Ardeshiri

  Author

• Mehrdad Zarafshan

  Author

These days humor plays an essential role in societies. Iran is also has many
translated humorous books, movies, serials and children stories from English to Persian and
Vice versa or in other languages such as, French, Arabic, Germany. But a translator may
encounter a whole range of problems while translating humor. However much of the humorous
translated texts have been discovered to be faulty as they lacked effective sense lost their
meaning and in some cases the sense of the main message in the source language was omitted.
Similar problems have surfaced with English Language Translation learners when translating
humorous texts in Iran. To successfully translate humorous texts, translators must take the
cultural effects into account. Present study which is a survey and a description set out to find out
the culture-specific strategies to improve English Language Translation learners’ problem for
translating humor. Framework of this study was adopted from Newmark (1988) and
Yarmohammadi’s (1993) points of view for translating metaphor and also the classification of
metaphors from Lakoff and Johnson (1978) to find the specific strategies in translating humor
from a cultural perspective. Quantitative research was conducted for this study and the
instruments were checklists and texts. Subjects of this study were 4 translation experts. A Chisquare
analysis was employed to analyze the data. It was found that all of the translators
preferred to apply culture of the second language in translation of humor. The findings of this
study may be a useful guideline for English teachers, translators, student majoring in translation
studies, writers of English text lessons and also program writing of teaching English in Persian
context.

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