On the Translation of Swearing into Spanish

Book excerpt: Audiovisual translation has attracted the attention of many researchers in the years since it became recognised as an academic discipline with an established theory of translation. For its part, cinema is one of today’s most powerful and influential media, and the vast number of US films translated for Spanish audiences merits particular academic attention. This book presents an analysis of the insults from seven films directed by the North American filmmaker Quentin Tarantino – Reservoir Dogs, Pulp Fiction, Four Rooms, Jackie Brown, Kill Bill (vols. I and II), Death Proof, and Inglourious Basterds – and how these insults have been translated from English into Spanish. One of the main reasons for building a corpus of this nature was to document the way Tarantino’s work is dubbed, and, using concrete examples, to describe the reality of translation and provide linguistic material with which to study dubbing, the most widespread translation modality in Spain. In an analysis of this nature, Tarantino’s films offer an interesting opportunity from a social perspective because of the exceptional number of insults they contain: 1526 insults have been recorded, classified and analysed in the preparation for this book. The magnitude of this figure is evidence of Tarantino’s constant use of swearwords, regardless of what his audiences might think, and whether or not they might sometimes prefer not to hear such a steady stream of foul language. Furthermore, his popularity has been achieved precisely because he refuses to allow distribution companies to alter his dialogues in any way, or modify the violence of his scenes, making Tarantino’s films of particular interest to the reader.