Taboo and Audiovisual Translation: A Descriptive Study of Translation Norms in the Subtitling of Taboo Language on Television

Abstract

Within Audiovisual Translation Studies, there have been many studies and thesis focused on the subtitling of taboo. Nonetheless, they are mainly restricted to quantitative and qualitative data about translation strategies or translation tendencies as well as overall explanations justifying the results. Thus, an analysis of taboo language in professional subtitling from the point of view of translation norms theory is still missing.

Positioned within the Descriptive Translation Studies paradigm, this thesis primary purpose is to study subtitling norms as far as taboo language is concerned in FTA (free-to-air, open-signal) television in Portugal, during the 21st century. Still, as said by Chesterman ([2006] 2017: 185): “[n]orms have become a key concept in Translation Studies, at least since Toury (1980). But there is still disagreement about how best to define them, and also how to study them”. Norms, being non-observable phenomena, raise methodological concerns in an empirical, descriptive study. As shared social entities, norms regulate not only the individuals’ behaviour but also their expectations regarding what is the appropriate behaviour at a particular place and time (Schäffner, 2010: 237). Bearing this in mind, this study proposed a model based on data triangulation, as suggested by Robinson (1999), Karamitroglou (2000), Brownlie (2003), Chesterman ([2006] 2017) and Schäffner (2010), which investigates observed regularities, on the one hand, and subtitlers’ beliefs, on the other, by examining i) a corpus of more than 134000 words from different subtitled movies broadcasted on FTA (national television between 2001 and 2015, and ii) the attitudes of Portuguese subtitlers towards the subtitling of taboo collected through questionnaires.

Both quantitative and qualitative analyses, regarding the corpus and the questionnaires, have identified the most frequent subtitling strategies, their motivations as well as the relevance of different textual (repetition, markedness, sematic field, textual function; extratextual function) and contextual variables (time period; state vs private channel) related to the subtitling of taboo. The findings have been taken as evidence to answer the main research question of this investigation by suggesting that the norm that potentially motivated the results values omission and euphemizing strategies within the translation of taboo.