Quality Assessment of Pun-Based Humor in Fansubbed Versus Professional Subtitles: The Case of Brooklyn Nine-Nine (2013–2015)

Fansubbing has started to spread widely and become more developed and accessible, thanks to the rise of the new media age and globalization, along with several technological advances. Nevertheless, there is still a perception that fansubbing is an unreliable source of translation. To examine this perception, the present study pursues three main objectives. First, it compares and evaluates the quality of subtitles produced by professional subtitlers, represented by Netflix, with those created by the fansubbers of Egybest for the first and second seasons of the American sitcom Brooklyn Nine-Nine. These seasons were selected because they offer numerous examples that serve the objectives of the study. Second, it also assesses the extent to which the quality of fansubs has improved, and third, it identifies the strategies used by each platform, with particular attention to linguistic challenges such as pun-based humor. Drawing on Zabalbeascoa’s (1996) classification of jokes, the study determines each type of pun-based joke, and by adopting Delabastita’s (1993) strategies of translating puns, the study qualitatively analyzes and compares the strategies used to render the pun-based humorous instances. Relying on Pederson’s (2017) FAR model, the study then assesses the quality of both the professional and fansubbed versions and categorizes and determines the types of errors and their severity, either minor, standard, or serious, according to the three parameters of the model: Functional Equivalence, Acceptability, and Readability. Moving on to the quantitative analysis, the study quantifies the number of errors committed in each parameter in professional subtitling vis-à-vis fansubbing. It is worth mentioning that few previous studies have examined Arabic subtitles of sitcoms, as most focus on other languages or on comparing subtitling with dubbing.
Therefore, this paper fills that gap by comparing two target Arabic subtitles of pun-based humor, which remains under-researched, and highlighting the strengths and weaknesses of each version.