Translating swear words from English into Galician in film subtitles
A corpus-based study
Published online: 10 April 2020
https://doi.org/10.1075/babel.00162.dia
https://doi.org/10.1075/babel.00162.dia
Abstract
As stated by Jay, Timothy; and Kristin Janschewitz. 2008. “The pragmatics of swearing”. Journal of Politeness Research 4 (2): 267–288. , 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, Timothy. 2009. “The utility and ubiquity of taboo words”. Perspectives on Psycological Science 4 (2): 153–161. : 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.
Keywords: swear words, audiovisual translation, subtitling, films, English, Galician
Résumé
Comme l’affirment Jay, Timothy; and Kristin Janschewitz. 2008. “The pragmatics of swearing”. Journal of Politeness Research 4 (2): 267–288. , la principale
fonction pragmatique des gros mots est d’exprimer des émotions, comme la colère ou la frustration. L’objectif principal du présent
article est d’analyser la traduction en galicien de fuck et shit, les deux gros mots les plus
courants en anglais (Jay, Timothy. 2009. “The utility and ubiquity of taboo words”. Perspectives on Psycological Science 4 (2): 153–161. : 156), ainsi que leurs variantes morphologiques. Le
corpus de sous-titres bilingues anglais-galiciens Veiga est l’instrument de recherche utilisé à cet effet. En ce qui concerne les
résultats obtenus dans cette étude, la solution la plus fréquente est la correspondance pragmatique, suivie de l’omission, de
l’atténuation et de la neutralisation. Cependant, en approfondissant l’analyse, des différences claires apparaissent dans le
traitement des deux mots. Ainsi, la tendance à aseptiser les sous-titres galiciens en omettant, en neutralisant ou en édulcorant
les gros mots est beaucoup plus évidente dans le cas de fuck. Ce résultat peut s’expliquer par la différence de
ton entre les deux mots tabous analysés. Étant donné que shit est considéré comme un gros mot plus anodin, les
traducteurs peuvent estimer qu’il n’est pas nécessaire de l’atténuer. De plus, si shit offre une traduction littérale parfaitement
naturelle en galicien, ce n’est pas le cas de fuck. Enfin, nous constatons également que la variable de catégorie
grammaticale a un impact sur le choix de la solution de traduction.
Mots-clés : gros mots, traduction audiovisuelle, sous-titrage, films, anglais, galicien
Article outline
- 1.Introduction
- 2.Pragmatic functions of swearing
- 3.On the translation of swear words
- 4.Methodology
- 4.1Objectives
- 4.2Description of the corpus
- 4.3Research stages
- 4.4Statistical analysis
- 5.Results and discussion
- 5.1Fuck and shit in the ST sub-corpus
- 5.2Translation solutions
- 5.3Variables
- 5.3.1Swear word: Fuck vs shit
- 5.3.2Grammatical category
- 6.Concluding remarks
- Notes
References
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