As stated by Jay and Janschewitz (2008), the primary pragmatic function
of swear words is to express emotions, such as anger and frustration. The main objective of the present paper is to analyse the
translation of the two commonest English swear words, fuck and shit (Jay 2009: 156) – together with their morphological variants – into Galician. The research instrument used
for this purpose has been the Veiga Corpus, a bilingual English-Galician corpus of subtitles. Regarding the results obtained in
this study, the most frequent solution has been pragmatic correspondence, followed by omission, softening, and de-swearing.
However, descending in the analysis, clear differences emerge between the treatment of the two words. Thus, the tendency to
sanitize the Galician subtitles by omitting, neutralizing or smoothing swearwords is much more evident in the case of
fuck. This finding may be explained by the difference in tone between the two taboo words analysed. As
shit is considered milder, translators may feel there is no need to tone it down. In addition, while
shit has a literal translation which is perfectly natural in Galician, that is not the case with
fuck. Finally, the grammatical category variable has also been found to have an effect on the choice of
translation solution.
The present paper aims to analyse the translation of puns from a relevance-theory perspective. According to such theoretical framework, the relation between a translation and its source text is considered to be based on interpretive resemblance, rather than on equivalence. The translator would try to seek optimal relevance, in such a way that he or she would use different strategies to try to recreate the cognitive effects intended by the source writer with the lowest possible processing effort on the part of the target addressee. The analysis carried out in this study is based on two tragedies by Shakespeare – namely, Hamlet and Othello – and on five Spanish and two Galician versions of those two plays. The strategies used by the translators of those versions to render sexual puns have been analysed, focusing not only on the product but also on the process. The selection of strategy is determined, among other factors, by the specific context and by the principle of relevance. In those cases in which there is a coincidence in the relation between the levels of signifier and signified across source and target language, translators normally opt to translate literally and reproduce a pun based on the same linguistic phenomenon as the source text pun and semantically equivalent to it. In the rest of the cases, the translator will have to assess what is more relevant, either content or the effect produced by the pun.
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