Re-borrowing of swearwords in the English translations of Jo Nesbø’s Harry Hole novels

Abstract

This article sets out to investigate what happens to borrowed English swearwords in some of Norwegian crime author Jo Nesbø’s books when these books are translated into English. The present study finds that a majority of them become re-borrowed, that is, they become transferred more or less straightforwardly back into English. A small reception study carried out among potential readers of the source texts (STs) and potential readers of the target texts (TTs) reveals that the perlocutionary effects of the borrowed items in the STs and their re-borrowed counterparts in the TTs are often perceived as having different degrees of force by the two groups. Furthermore, when asked to describe the type of person who uses a given borrowed vs. re-borrowed item in order to tease out the social implicatures the uses of the different swearwords might engender, the Norwegian respondents tend, among other things, to consistently judge the users of borrowed swearwords in the STs as younger than the English-language respondents judge the users of the corresponding re-borrowed swearwords to be. All in all, these results provide strong indications that the strategy of re-borrowing causes shifts in readers' experience of swearwords in literary works, which affects characterization.