Investigating the Translators’ Strategies in Subtitling and Dubbing of Taboos in American Drama Television Series The Big Little Lies (2019)

Abstract

One of the most difficult tasks that translators deal with when dubbing or subtitling an audiovisual product is translating offensive terms or expressions such as taboos. Translators must handle the translation of taboos with care, as their equivalents may be contrary to the religion and cultural norms of the target country. To that end, some strategies should be employed by translators to choose appropriate equivalents based on the cultural and religious norms of the target language. Thus, the current study aimed to investigate the strategies employed in subtitling and dubbing English taboos in seven episodes of one American television series using Davoodi’s (2009) model. This was corpus-based research that has a qualitative-quantitative method with a comparative approach. To conduct the study, the American English drama crime TV series The Big Little Lies (2019) season two was chosen as the study corpus. 174 taboos, specifically Sh*t and F*k word, were found based on Sharifi and Darchinian's (2009) model in the above- mentioned TV series. Descriptive statistics have been run to examine the frequencies and percentages of implemented translation strategies in subtitling and dubbing the taboos. The results revealed that “Substitution”, and “Censorship” were the commonly most frequently used strategies in Persian subtitled and dubbed versions of taboos. Moreover, the findings of the Chi-square test indicated that no significant difference was identified between the strategies of Iranian translators in subtitling and dubbing taboos. The findings of this research can be useful for subtitlers, dubbers, and translation students in Iran who specialize in translating English TV series.