The (ab)use of taboo lexis in audiovisual translation: Raising awareness of pragmatic variation in English-Spanish

Abstract

This paper proposes the use of translation as an exercise capable of raising students' awareness of pragmatic differences between English and Spanish, with particular emphasis on taboo words, rarely studied in a formal environment. This difficult area of the L2 has been brought to the fore after the publication of two corpus-driven grammars (Biber et al. 1999;Carter and McCarthy 2006). The translation exercise was carried out with two groups of advanced students, who had to render two episodes of the British sitcom The I. T. Crowd into Spanish. Then the results were compared with the choices in the dubbed versions. Two hypotheses were put to the test: (1) that students would tone down the swearwords used in the original text, (2) that translators might remain closer to the colloquial tone of the English scripts and, thus, maintain taboo items. For the second hypothesis all six episodes of series 1 were used. The results showed that while students were indeed cautious in the treatment of offensive language, translators increased the use of swearwords exponentially.

traducción audiovisual del lenguaje tabú entre lenguas romances

“…Como no hubo ningún caso de intensificación en la traducción de los tabúes lingüísticos somáticos, en este contexto de análisis no se aplica la hipótesis de la vulgarización en el doblaje (Valdeón 2015(Valdeón , 2020 tampoco en la subtitulación en PT-BR de tabúes lingüísticos somáticos.…”

“…Esto quiere decir que la atenuación y la omisión son dos técnicas de traducción muy utilizadas cuando se trata de las palabrotas en la subtitulación 2 . Sin embargo, estas dos técnicas no siempre son las más adecuadas para el diálogo o la escena traducida (Scandura 2004, Hjort 2009, Valdeón 2015. Aunque haya la premisa de que en la subtitulación las palabrotas son desechables y su lectura causa una mala impresión en la audiencia, según Díaz-Cintas ( 2001), se cree que tales palabras cumplen funciones específicas en la caracterización e interacción entre los personajes y, en consecuencia, en la narrativa fílmica.…”

Pragmatic awareness in translator training

“…Son olarak Yerinde kal! bu bağlam için uygun bir çeviri olarak gözükmemektedir: Daha yakın tarihli bir başka araştırmada, Valdeón resmî bağlamlarda pek ele alınmayan "tabu sözcüklere odaklanarak İngilizce ve İspanyolca arasındaki edimbilimsel farklılıklar konusunda öğrencilerin farkındalıklarını artırmak üzere çevirinin kullanılabileceğini" savunmaktadır (Valdeón, 2015). Araştırmacı bu amaçla görsel işitsel malzemelerin dikkat çekici olması nedeniyle tercih edilebileceğini vurgulamaktadır (a.g.e., s. 365).…”

THE OFFTATLED PROJECT: OFFensive and TAboo Exchanges SubtiTLED BY ONLINE UNIVERSITY STUDENTS

“…This research avenue opens out to innovative and pioneering studies in this field. Valdeón (2015) presents the results of a piece of research in which university students have to dub some episodes of a series from English to Spanish and whose results are compared with the way professional AV translators coped with such taboo elements. The present paper also deals with university students from the UNED (Universidad Nacional de Educación a Distancia, the Spanish Open University) who have to produce interlingual subtitles of film scenes (from English to Spanish and Spanish to English) in which there are offensive and taboo terms.…”