Avoiding Offensive Language in Audio-visual Translation: A Case Study of Subtitling from English to Slovenian

Abstract

The article explores the strategies for avoiding offensive language in the Slovenian subtitles of 50 English-language films. The analysis encompassed all examples of strong language in each of the films and established that almost half of the more than 4000 instances of such language were not preserved in Slovenian. Profanity was avoided more often in films that made more frequent use of it. In less than one-fifth of the instances were there objective reasons for omitting it; the remaining instances can be regarded as (self-)censorship. On a few occasions, offensive language also appears to have been lost in translation because translators failed to grasp the connotative meaning of the original terms. Four strategies for avoiding offensive language were identified: the most frequently employed strategy was deletion, followed by modulation of register, while the strategies substitution with a pronoun and radical change of meaning were used far less often. Furthermore, the study has shown that avoiding offensive language may cause certain shifts on the macrostructural level of a film, i.e. alter the audience's understanding of the plot, the characterization, the perception of relationships between characters, etc.