TITLE: Subtitling Swear Words from English into Chinese: A Corpus-Based Study of Big Little Lies

AUTHORS: Shuangjiao Wu

KEYWORDS: Subtitling, Swear Words, Translation Solution, Corpus-Based Study

JOURNAL NAME: Open Journal of Modern Linguistics, Vol.11 No.2, April 30, 2021

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.