Is "Shrek" still funny in Turkish? An analysis of the strategies employed during the Turkish dubbing. Translation of humor in the animated film "Shrek"

Thanks to globalization and technology, the interaction among different cultures has disseminated worldwide and translation has taken on a vital role by bridging gaps and maintaining communication. As one of the fast-growing fields of translation studies, audiovisual translation has recently been the subject of a wide range of research. However, the number of studies focusing on dubbing translation in the Turkish context is still limited. Therefore, this study aims to examine the strategies employed by the dubbing translator to contend with the translation of humorous expressions into the target language. The method used is a qualitative descriptive method with the data selected from the film ‘Shrek’ taken from the platform Netflix. The data consists of intentionally collected humorous examples from the film and their dubbed versions. The extracted examples are analyzed with the strategies proposed by Pedersen (2005). Upon identifying the strategies, the results are classified to demonstrate the strategies mostly adopted by the translator. The findings reveal that substitution, paraphrasing, and addition strategies are largely employed throughout the dubbing translation. It can also be stated that a mixture of strategies is used depending on the humorous expression. Overall, this study offers insight for future research in dubbing in the language pair of Turkish-English.