The present work is aimed at investigating deformation strategy in audiovisual translation. Two French films «Le fabuleux destin d’Amélie Poulain» and «Intouchables» were selected to be studied. The article presents a comparative analysis of their translations into Russian, English and German. Analyzed translations are made for subtitling and dubbing. Thus for each of the target versions a parallel corpus was created, matching the source language utterances with the target language correspondences. For this purpose, the original dialogues and the dialogues of dubbed versions were transcribed, the subtitles were extracted from DVDs in SRT text format. A comparative analysis of the corpora was carried out, focusing on the transformations occurred in target texts with respect to the originals. Whilst the translation process there is always something lost or gained, the main interest of the current work concerns these meaningful changes which in the transformational theory of translation are described as a source text deformation. In this context deformation can be defined as a deliberate distortion by the translator of any parameter of the source text, thus as a translation strategy. Such a deviation is caused by a general translation aim that differs the deformation from a translation error. Considering deformation as a translation strategy, the present study attempted to clarify main tendencies in using the deformation of the source texts carried out in the framework of the two AVT modalities — subtitling and dubbing. First, the samples were analyzed qualitatively focusing on the differences between the two renderings (subtitled and dubbed versions) of the original texts into each of the target languages. This kind of analysis helps to identify several tendencies specific to each AVT modality. Subsequently, the observations were verified with a quantitative analysis of the target texts. A comparison of the translated texts allowed conclusions to be drawn about the extent of their «deformity» with respect to the original text. The results of the study indicated that the significant difference between the two AVT modalities under examination lies in the frequency of deformations comparing not only the subtitled vs. the dubbed versions but also comparing versions in different languages: the largest number of deformations in dubbing was observed in the Russian dubbed version, the smallest in subtitling — in the subtitled English one. It is noteworthy that a relatively high level of deformation is also peculiar to subtitling, usually considered as a foreignization strategy with high «fidelity» to the source text.