Have a personal or library account? Click to login
The Subtitling Strategies Adopted to Render the Four-Letter Words Fuck, Shit and Their Variants in the French Version of Orange Is the New Black: A Corpus-Based Study Cover

The Subtitling Strategies Adopted to Render the Four-Letter Words Fuck, Shit and Their Variants in the French Version of Orange Is the New Black: A Corpus-Based Study

By: Eponine Moreau  
Open Access
|Dec 2024

Abstract

This paper aims to investigate the translation strategies used to render swear words from English into French subtitles in Netflix Original Series. More specifically, we present the methodology applied to describe the translation strategies used to render 200 instances of the swear word fuck and 138 instances of the swear word shit in the first season of Orange Is the New Black (OITNB). All 338 instances were classified into six strategies, partly drawing on existing typologies of subtitling strategies. While the omission and standardization strategies have been borrowed from existing typologies, the definitions of the euphemism and maintenance strategies have been adapted. The textual analyses also allowed for the identification of two new translation strategies. Although less frequent in the corpus, these strategies, called direct compensation and pragmatic softening, are thought to better reflect French idiosyncrasies and complement existing typologies.

DOI: https://doi.org/10.5334/as.195 | Journal eISSN: 2184-6006
Language: English
Submitted on: Oct 20, 2024
|
Accepted on: Nov 18, 2024
|
Published on: Dec 13, 2024
Published by: Ubiquity Press
In partnership with: Paradigm Publishing Services
Publication frequency: 2 issues per year

© 2024 Eponine Moreau, published by Ubiquity Press
This work is licensed under the Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 License.