Misconstructing Characters: A Critical Look at the Translation of the Swearing Words

Abstract

Translating swearing words has become an interesting study to conduct, especially because it involves two different languages that carry different social values. One language might be rich of such words that are considered as taboos, in this case swearing words, others might restrict the use of swearing words. This might create a problem when the swearing words are used as parts of the characterization of a character in a story. As one of the traits, swearing words should be translated as close as possible in order not to distort the character’s quality. This is the task of the translator not to misconstruct the characters in the text s/he translates. This study explores character shift such character distortion due to the translation of swearing words in subtitle translation of a movie, “Suicide Squad” in Indonesian context.

Bad Words in the Good Place: Analyzing the Euphemistic Function of Wordplays in Subtitling and Dubbing – A Case of English and Portuguese Language Pair

“…Out of the 11 channels investigated by her, in only one, she observed the use of dirty language; in the others, they were simply substituted or omitted. This seems (or seemed) to be the norm in other countries, as well, such as in Italy (Beseghi 2016), Spain (Ávila-Cabrera 2016, and Indonesia (Darta 2020), for instance.…”