Euphemistic Strategies Used in Subtitling English Taboo Expressions into Chinese: A Case Study of Big Little Lies

Abstract

This study aims to analyse the euphemistic strategies used in translating taboo words in a parallel corpus, an English-Chinese corpus of subtitles of the TV series Big Little Lies Season 1. A range of examples from the first season of the series are classified into three categories of taboo areas: sex-related terms, same sex-related terms and private body organs. The study analyzes the data quantitively and qualitatively. The findings of the study reject the assumption that euphemistic strategies would be more frequently used when translating the above taboo words into Chinese version. As to the translation of taboo words, the translation strategies used to render the three categories of taboo words are as follows: literal translation, widening and omission. In the whole corpus, the most frequently used translation strategy is literal translation, accounting for 88.6%, while the euphemistic strategies, which include omission and widening, only account for 11.4% in total.