This paper suggests that compensation can be seen as a macro-strategy (covering several lower-level tactics) in film subtitling – particularly in the comedy genre, where equivalence of effect (making the audience laugh) is of crucial importance for the translator. The examples used in this study are taken from an Astérix film and its subtitles. In this kind of context, compensation is argued to concern multimodality, i.e. to apply to different kinds of mostly simultaneous semiotic elements rather than solely blocks of source text discourse, which would, for some reason, need to be “recovered” elsewhere in the translation. Beyond the multimodality of filmic discourse, reception is also influenced by the viewers’ knowledge, background and experience, which therefore also contribute to determining whether the effect is equivalent or not. In this sense, the work of the translator is essentially to anticipate the weaknesses of future reception and compensate for any semiotic losses it might encounter.