A translator in the face of linguistic violence/aggression – challenges and translation methods

Abstract

The objective of the article shall be the definition of language of violence/aggression and the discourses, in which violence is explicitly depicted. Several definitions shall be provided to prove that the distinction between violence and aggression in linguistic terms is not so clear-cut. What challenges each translator faces when they are confronted with the need to translate a language of violence to relevantly reflect its intensity? What methods or means are applied by each translator in such situations? These are the questions which must be posed to explain any doubts which accompany each translator in their daily struggle with such linguistic material. The practical part of the article shall comprise the contexts reflecting the sources, which most frequently require the transposition from a source language (SL) into a target language (TL), e.g., psychological texts, films, etc. Thus, several words were selected for the corpus research. They shall be demonstrated and exemplified based on miscellaneous contexts in which they occur. The purpose of the research was to observe how the four selected words, exemplifying linguistic violence / aggression in Polish and English are translated into a target language (Polish or English correspondingly). As the results reveal, the transposition of such words into a target language may comply with the researcher’s expectations or not. It is dependent on various contexts and the register in which such transposition must be conducted.