A corpus-based study on the English-Chinese swearwords produced by amateur (fansubbing) and professional (prosubbing) subtitling

Abstract

ABSTRACT The translation of culturally-sensitive elements, especially swearwords, poses a unique challenge for audiovisual (AV) products which are increasingly disseminated online to millions ofdiverse audiences. This study focuses on the convergence and divergence in the translation of swearwords by fan-produced and professional subtitles. Fansubbing, a fusion of ‘fan’ and ‘subtitling’, has gained prominence as volunteers translate foreign AV content into their domestic markets mainly due to the technological advances. Adopting a corpus-based approach, this study analyses translation patterns from a self-built corpus of 549,349 words from the original English scripts aligned with 528,889 professionally and 543,522 non-professionally translated Chinese words from a diverse sample of 57 recent English films. Ourresults predominantly reveal convergent practices, however, fansubbing appeared to adopt a more vulgarising approach when rendering swearwords (55%) than prosubbing (46%). No significant change or difference isobserved in terms of the frequency of strategy use over time and the frequency of retained semantics and pragmaticsbetween the two practices. Our findings help todisentangle the complex task of translating swearwords in audiovisual content, contributing novel and valuable empirical evidence.