A Norm-Based Analysis of Swearing Rendition in Professional Dubbing and Non-Professional Subtitling from English into Persian

This study takes a norm-based approach to analyzing the dubbing and nonprofessionalsubtitling of English swearing into Persian in an American movie.The article revolves around three main theoretical frameworks, i.e., Wajnryb(2005), Toury (1995, 2012a, 2012b), and Chesterman (1997). After analyzing thestrategies in rendering the original swearing into Persian, the researchers achieveda model of four basic strategies: (a) direct translation with strong force, (b) directtranslation with weak force, (c) deletion, and (d) foreignization. On the whole, theresults of this research showed that both dubbed and non-professional subtitledversions were target language-oriented with deleting the original swearing as themost frequent strategy. But, the vulgarity and the degree of offensiveness ofswearing in the original version were to some extent euphemized in the dubbedversion. On the other hand, the non-professional subtitled version, in comparisonwith the dubbed version, employed more direct translation of the originalswearing with strong force. The article then proceeded to delve into why thesestrategies were employed by the dubbed and non-professional subtitled producers,and why there were remarkable differences between the two versions. Thefindings provided useful information within descriptive translation studies;nevertheless, they cannot be generalized since the study was limited by a relativelysmall corpus and utilized a non-probability sampling procedure.

Keywords:

Swearing , Translation , Dubbing , Non-Professional Subtitling , Norms , Omission