Document Type : Research Paper
Abstract
Taboo words are widely used in American movies that manifest cursing and obscene denotations. The problem that should be tackled is that Arab subtitlers translating these movies are obliged to avoid translating these words literally due to certain social and religious bearings. In lieu, they adopt euphemistic strategies that mitigate these taboo words. Objective: this paper aims at determining the euphemistic subtitling strategies Arab professional and amateur subtitlers adopt when translating taboo words in two American movies into Arabic. Methodology: a corpus-based approach has been adopted based on picking out the English taboo words spoken in the dialogues, and revealing their Arabic equivalents subtitled by Arab professional and amateur subtitlers. To categorize the taboo words into types, the qualitative content analysis method was applied in the analytical framework and Khalaf and Rashid’s (2017) model of strategies employed in attenuating swearwords has been followed with some modifications. The semantic change occurring in the field of taboo words, mollified due to adopting different strategies of euphemization in the subtitling process was considerably verified. Findings: the analysis shows that deletion, semantic field change, euphemized expressions, lexical generalization, and metaphorization are the commonly adopted strategies in rendering taboo words in the movies. Several taboo words were partially euphemized, while others were totally euphemized, yet others were deleted all together.
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