Subtitling strategies of swear words and taboo expressions in the movie “Training Day”

Abdelaal, Noureldin Mohamed; Sarhani, Amani Al

doi:10.1016/j.heliyon.2021.e07351

Cited by 20 publications

(12 citation statements)

References 9 publications

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“…The study's results suggested that the Arabic subtitles generated by the satellite Arabic TV channel mainly used euphemistic language. This result is comparable to those made by some researchers who indicated that omission is the most prevalent subtitling strategy in translating swear words and taboos from English into Arabic (Abdelaal and Al Sarhani, 2021;Al-Yasin and Rabab'ah, 2019;Almijrab, 2020;Debbas and Haider, 2020).…”

Section: Introductionsupporting

confidence: 86%

“…The subtitlers may omit swear words that have no equivalents in the target language or elicit negative reactions from the audience. According to Abdelaal and Al Sarhani (2021), omission can be used due to constraints in the target culture, making it tough to render some swear words into Arabic, particularly those that are considered highly derogatory and abhorrent. Another reason for adopting this strategy in subtitling is spatial constraints, which allow for a limited number of characters.…”

Section: Analysis and Resultsmentioning

confidence: 99%

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Strategies of translating swear words into Arabic: a case study of a parallel corpus of Netflix English-Arabic movie subtitles

Abu-Rayyash

Haider

Al-Adwan

2023

Humanit Soc Sci Commun

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This study adopts a corpus-assisted approach to explore the translation strategies that Netflix subtitlers opted for in rendering 1564 English swear words into Arabic. It uses a 699,229-word English-Arabic parallel corpus consisting of the English transcriptions of forty English movies, drama, action, science fiction (sci-fi), and biography and their Arabic subtitles. Using the wordlist tool in SketchEngine, the researchers identified some frequent swear words, namely fuck, shit, damn, ass, bitch, bastard, asshole, dick, cunt, and pussy. Moreover, using the parallel concordance tool in SketchEngine revealed that three translation strategies were observed in the corpus, namely, omission, softening, and swear-to-non-swear. The omission strategy accounted for the lion’s share in the investigated data, with 66% for drama, 61% for action, 52% for biography, and 40% for sci-fi. On the other hand, the swear-to-non-swear strategy was the least adopted one, accounting for 21% in sci-fi, 16% in biography, 14% in drama, and 11% in action. In addition, the softening strategy got the second-highest frequency across the different movie genres, with 39% for sci-fi, 32% for biography, 28% for action, and 20% for drama. Since swear words have connotative functions, omitting or euphemizing them could cause a slight change in the representation of meaning and characters. The study recommends more corpus-assisted studies on different AVT modes, including dubbing, voiceover, and free commentaries.

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Section: Introductionsupporting

confidence: 86%

Section: Analysis and Resultsmentioning

confidence: 99%

Strategies of translating swear words into Arabic: a case study of a parallel corpus of Netflix English-Arabic movie subtitles

Abu-Rayyash

Haider

Al-Adwan

2023

Humanit Soc Sci Commun

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“…The omission or deletion of taboo terms in the translation is a common practice in F-Words translation. It happened due to the stigma of assuming that F-Words always have a negative meaning (Abdelaal & Sarhani (2021); Pratama (2016); Arif, et.al (2019)). However, the findings of this study revealed that the features of translated F-Words showed the variation in lexical equivalence.…”

Section: Discussionmentioning

confidence: 99%

“…On several levels, translating such specific cultural terms is challenging. When it comes to subtitling, the challenge is greater, (Abdelaal & Al Sarhani, 2021). Unlike other types of written translation, in subtitling, it does not allow for hand solutions to untranslatable terms such as footnotes, glosses, and a variety of other translation techniques which can be used to explain some culture-bound terms.…”

Section: Introductionmentioning

confidence: 99%

The Lexical Equivalence Variety of F-Words Translation Into Indonesian : Corpus-Based Translation Research

Sianipar

Sajarwa

2022

LRJ

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Translating the movie subtitle is increasingly recognised as a meaning-making mode and language variety in its own right. However, making the meaning is a difficult task when the word is considered taboo in the target language. Therefore, this study attempts to identify the translation of F-Words which are generally considered taboo in Indonesia. The object material of this study is corpus parallel, OpenSubtitle Corpus 2016 which contains correspondence of English- Indonesian data, and focuses on seeing the F-Words translation. The F-Words in this research consisted of fuck, fucks, fucking, fucked, fucker and its compounds such as motherfucker, motherfuck, and motherfucking. This present study employed translational research which took an interpretative qualitative-quantitative analysis. Based on the analysis, the total occurrences of F-Words in the corpus is 7938 occurrences and showed that there is a variation of lexical equivalence of F-Words translation in Indonesia. The finding reveals that the lexical translation of the F-Words in Indonesian is not restricted to negative or taboo. Furthermore, the analysis on the function of F-Words translation in Indonesian translation shows the flexibility of F-Words which can be employed to show solidarity, emphasis meaning, insult, emotion, failure, and misery

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“…The movie is the media that show the social life of human through the story (Abdelaal & Sarhani, 2021;Castillo et al, 2021). It will become an interesting thing to analyze the speech acts in the movie.…”

Section: Introductionmentioning

confidence: 99%

An Analysis of Speech Acts in Merry Riana : Mimpi Sejuta Dollar Movie

Sumaniari

Ramendra

Mahendrayana

2021

JPBI

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People rarely know the function of the language used in the film. This study analyzes speech acts in a dialogue film entitled Merry Riana: Dreams of a Million Dollars. This research is a qualitative descriptive study. Data were analyzed from the form of speech acts consisting of direct and indirect speech acts in the form of declarative, imperative, and interrogative. The type of speech act analysis uses Searle's theory of representative, directive, commissive, expressive, and declaration. The result of this research is that direct speech act in interrogative form is 43.63%. Direct speech acts in the declarative form are 95 (43.18%), direct speech acts in the imperative form are 24 (10.90%), indirect speech acts in the imperative form are 2 (0.9%), indirect speech acts in imperative form as much as 2 (0.9%). interrogative form is 2 (0.9%), and indirect speech act in declarative form is 1 (0.45%). Furthermore, 74 utterances are analyzed into five types of speech acts. The most dominant representative used 36 (48.6%). Then followed by directive 21 (28.3%), expressive 14 (18.9%), commissive 3 (4.0%), and declarative 0 (0.0%). This research implies that understanding speech acts plays an important role in communication.

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Subtitling strategies of swear words and taboo expressions in the movie “Training Day”

Cited by 20 publications

References 9 publications

Strategies of translating swear words into Arabic: a case study of a parallel corpus of Netflix English-Arabic movie subtitles

Strategies of translating swear words into Arabic: a case study of a parallel corpus of Netflix English-Arabic movie subtitles

The Lexical Equivalence Variety of F-Words Translation Into Indonesian : Corpus-Based Translation Research

An Analysis of Speech Acts in Merry Riana : Mimpi Sejuta Dollar Movie

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