Attenuating Obscenity of Swearwords in the Amateur Subtitling of English Movies into Arabic

Abstract

The interlingual subtitling of swearwords poses problems to translators due to differences in the degree of tolerating the obscenity of such words by various speech communities. To account for the perplexities incurred in the intercultural transference of swearwords, translators adopt attenuation strategies that facilitate their mediating role between cultures. In line with this, the present study attempts to identify the strategies adopted by Arab amateur subtitlers to mitigate the obscenity of swearwords in English movies. It utilizes a corpus-based approach to identify the factors affecting the decisions made by these subtitlers. The content analysis method was used in categorizing swearwords and in the translation comparison process, Toury's (1996) 'coupled pairs' model was adopted to identify attenuation strategies. The findings revealed that the common strategies used to mitigate the obscenity of swearwords are deletion, change of semantic fields, register shift and the use of archaic words, using euphemistic expressions, generalization and linguistic substitution and ambiguity. Moreover, cultural norms play a significant role in choosing the translation strategy to handle swearwords. Introduction The digital revolution has brought nations very close to each other; the physical borders have been removed making the world a very small village with globalization. As a result of this physical approximation, cultural interaction has tremendously increased via the fast and convenient access to means of communication. Such an attractive environment has invoked the desire of enthusiastic people to learn more about the peculiarities of other cultures. Their desire was nourished through the consumption of audiovisual productions such as films and TV programs as platforms that represent good reflections of the traditions, customs and life styles of the culture they depict. Nowadays, people can access such productions via TV satellite channels, YouTube, Internet websites and even personal mobile phones whereby they can watch whatever they like anytime and everywhere (Orrego-Carmona, 2012). As a result, people abandoned the traditional ways of acquiring knowledge through reading books and exploited the digital facilities for that end. According to Gambier (2009), people nowadays acquire knowledge via watching subtitled audiovisual products much more than reading books. The need for foreign audiovisual productions has given prominence to audiovisual translation as an active discipline within Translation Studies (Baker, 2001). The fact that most audiovisual productions are produced in English makes the translation of such productions into the consumers' native language mandatory. This situation poses a challenge on translators due to the increase demand on translated films and TV programs (Diaz-Cintas, 2005). As is well-known, the most important mediums for translating such productions are subtitling and dubbing. The choice between these two mediums is based on economic and ideological considerations, hence, subtitling has become prominent because it is cheaper, faster and it preserves the authenticity of the original text (Chiaro, 2009).