Abstract
As Jay and Janschewitz (2008) highlight, the pragmatic function of swear words is to express emotions, such as anger and frustration. The main objective of the present paper is to analyze the translation of the two commonest swear words in English, namely fuck and shit (Jay, 2009: p. 156; Rojo & Valenzuela, 2000: p. 209) and their morphological variants into Chinese in subtitles of the TV series Big Little Lies Season 1. The research instrument used in this study has been the Parallel Corpus with the software Paraconc, a bilingual English-Chinese corpus of subtitles. Regarding the research results, it could be observed in the findings of translation solutions, among which 66.3% of the instances were rendered in a sanitized manner, including omission taking 31.6%, softening 27.6% and deswearing 7.1%. In addition, the factors such as the variables of swear words and the grammatical category of swear words also have an influence on the selection of translation solutions.
Highlights
The presence of swear words in subtitles is a translation problem which has lately received scholars’ increasing attention
It could be observed in the findings of translation solutions, among which 66.3% of the instances were rendered in a sanitized manner, including omission taking 31.6%, softening 27.6% and de-swearing 7.1%
The factors such as the variables of swear words and the grammatical category of swear words have an influence on the selection of translation solutions
Summary
The presence of swear words in subtitles is a translation problem which has lately received scholars’ increasing attention. The main objective of the present paper is to analyze the translation of the two commonest swear words in English, namely fuck and shit It’s a bilingual English-Chinese corpus of subtitles. Considering the total number of instances of the two swear words and morphological variants retrieved from the corpus, 98 examples have been analyzed. Two variables have been investigated to check whether there was interdependence between each of them and the choice of translation solution. Those two variables were the specific swear word—fuck v.s. shit and the grammatical category or part of speech: noun, verb, adjective, adverb, and interjection
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