What the Fuck Didn't You Translate? - The Subtitling Strategies and Techniques Used to Render the F-Word and its Variants in Netflix Original Series

What the Fuck Didn’t You Translate? : The Subtitling Strategies and Techniques Used to Render the F-Word and Its Variants in Netflix Original Series
Over the last twenty years, a growing number of articles, chapters, books, and postgraduate theses have investigated the translation strategies used to render swear/taboo words as the interest of researchers and practitioners in such complex and multifunctional terms grew. As culturally sensitive and context-dependent terms that are increasingly frequent in audiovisual fiction, swear/taboo words in general, and the f-word and its variants in particular, poses a challenge for subtitlers. However, to this day, very few studies have investigated the subtitling strategies and techniques used to render these terms from English into French. Early studies focusing on other language pairs have often highlighted tendencies towards omission or toning down strategies, attributing such attenuation to (self-)censorship. More recently, however, several scholars have stressed the need to move away from this perspective (Valdéon, 2023; Pavesi & Formentelli, 2023; Bucaria, 2024). Within subtitling, for instance, Díaz-Pérez (2020) has shown that the distribution of strategies used to translate the terms fuck and shit in Galician varied according to the word classes. Within dubbing, Pavesi and Formentelli (2023) have highlighted the influence of intratextual factors such as the grammatical categories or pragmatic functions of the f-word and its derivatives on the strategies used to render them in Italian. In part, this change of perspective stems from the advent of streaming platforms. Bucaria (2024, A56) observes that streaming giants such as Netflix and Amazon Prime Video adopt a more lenient attitude towards the rendering of swear/taboo words in their contents compared to linear TV producers and distributors. In the Netflix Timed Text Style Guide (TTSG) for French , subtitlers are instructed not to censor dialogue and to implement solutions that match the tone of the original content and are relevant to the target audience.
Building on these developments, this paper presents a two-layered typology of strategies and techniques that describes the French-speaking subtitlers’ options when it comes to translating the f-word and its derivatives. This corpus-based study highlights and discusses the recurring textual patterns in the subtitling of fuck into French and the correlation between these patterns and the structural-functional categories of the instances of the f-word retrieved from an ad-hoc bilingual corpus (approximately 391,965 words). of three Netflix Original Series. Following Pavesi and Formentelli (2023), the proposed typology includes four distinct strategies (full translation, softening, deswearing, and omission) whose distribution is then correlated with the grammatical and pragmatic functions of the f-word based on the model established by McEnery (2006). As it proposes the first typology of translation strategies for the subtitling of swear/taboo words in French, this study contributes to the existing related literature in other language pairs. It also intends to serve as a springboard for future quantitative analyses of the strategies used to render swear/taboo words in larger corpora of French subtitles.

Cited References

Bucaria, C. (2024). Assessing the Adaptation of Audiovisual Taboo Content: The Role of Paratextual Information (Vol. 43). MediAzioni.
Díaz-Pérez, F. J. (2020). Translating Swear Words from English into Galician in Film Subtitles: A Corpus-Based Study. Babel, 66(3), 393–419. https://doi.org/10.1075/babel.00162.dia
McEnery, T. (2006). Swearing in English: Bad language, Purity and Power from 1586 to the Present. Routledge.
Pavesi, M., & Formentelli, M. (2023). The Pragmatic Dimensions of Swearing in Films: Searching for Coherence in Dubbing Strategies. Journal of Pragmatics, 217, 126–139. https://doi.org/10.1016/j.pragma.2023.09.003