Translating swear words from English into Galician in film subtitles

Abstract

As stated by Jay and Janschewitz (2008), the primary pragmatic function of swear words is to express emotions, such as anger and frustration. The main objective of the present paper is to analyse the translation of the two commonest English swear words, fuck and shit (Jay 2009: 156) – together with their morphological variants – into Galician. The research instrument used for this purpose has been the Veiga Corpus, a bilingual English-Galician corpus of subtitles. Regarding the results obtained in this study, the most frequent solution has been pragmatic correspondence, followed by omission, softening, and de-swearing. However, descending in the analysis, clear differences emerge between the treatment of the two words. Thus, the tendency to sanitize the Galician subtitles by omitting, neutralizing or smoothing swearwords is much more evident in the case of fuck. This finding may be explained by the difference in tone between the two taboo words analysed. As shit is considered milder, translators may feel there is no need to tone it down. In addition, while shit has a literal translation which is perfectly natural in Galician, that is not the case with fuck. Finally, the grammatical category variable has also been found to have an effect on the choice of translation solution.

Subtitling Swear Words from English into Chinese: A Corpus-Based Study of <i>Big Little Lies</i>

“…It has been stated (Rojo & Valenzuela, 2000;Fernández Dobao, 2006) that the translation of swear words is a delicate issue and that cross-cultural differences regarding swearing should be taken into account by the translator. As put forward on several occasions (Díaz Cintas, 2001;Chen, 2004;Hjort, 2009;Díaz Cintas & Remael, 2014;Han & Wang, 2014;Díaz-Pérez, 2020), swearing and taboo words tend to be toned down due to several reasons. Amongst the reasons which might explain the resort to the omission solution and to the sanitizing tendency in general, it has been highlighted (Mayoral, 1993;Ivarsson & Carroll, 1998;Díaz Cintas, 2001;Chen, 2004;Han & Wang, 2014;Cabrera & Javier, 2015, 2016a, 2016bSantamaría Ciordia, 2016;Díaz-Pérez, 2020), for instance, that the impact of swear words in the written language is reinforced as compared to their use in oral speech.…”

“…In this sense, Hjort (2009) reports that in a questionnaire she administered to translators, 93% of the informants agreed that swear words were stronger when written in subtitles than when uttered in oral speech (Díaz-Pérez, 2020 Javier Díaz-Pérez (2020) highlights that "the context in which reading takes place must also be taken into account according to Díaz Cintas, since it is not the same to read a novel in private as to read the subtitles of a film in public. Although in the end reading is always an individual act, a high amount of taboo words in the subtitles of a film may be perceived as more aggressive than the same quantity of taboo words in a novel".…”

“…The fact that the lack of a direct counterpart of the source text (ST) swear word in the target language (TL) is another reason which may explain both the omission of swear words and the sanitizing tendency in the target text (TT) (Díaz-Pérez, 2020). Swearing is culture-specific, and as highlighted by Han and Wang (2014: p. 1), literal translations of ST swear words with no existing direct counterparts in the TL would most likely be considered unnatural by the TT viewer.…”

“…The presence of swear words in subtitles is a translation problem which has lately received scholars' increasing attention. The main pragmatic function of these lexical items, as Jay and Janschewitz (2008) highlight, is to express emotions, such as anger and frustration (Díaz-Pérez, 2020). As Greenall (2011) states following Mao (1996), swearing generates social implicature, which means that "it gives valuable hints regarding aspects of individuality and class membership, information which is crucial in understanding where someone comes from" (Greenall, 2011: p. 45).…”

“…The translation of swear words in subtitling is an under-researched area in audiovisual translation in general and in subtitling in particular, as emphasized by Cabrera & Javier (2016a: p. 38), who says that the use of taboo language was more researched in dubbing than in subtitling (Díaz-Pérez, 2020). While a growing interest in AVT research can be seen in many European countries, little has been done in the Chinese world, where to the best of the researcher's knowledge, very few studies have been done to investigate the different translation solutions of swear words, and whether the variables of swear words could have an effect on those translation solutions used in their translations in the Chinese culture.…”