Euphemistic Strategies Used in Subtitling English Taboo Expressions into Chinese: A Case Study of Big Little Lies ()
ABSTRACT
This
study aims to analyse the euphemistic strategies used in translating taboo
words in a parallel corpus, an English-Chinese corpus of subtitles of the TV series Big Little Lies Season 1. A range of
examples from the first season of the series are classified into three
categories of taboo areas: sex-related terms, same sex-related terms and
private body organs. The study analyzes the data quantitively and
qualitatively. The findings of the study reject the assumption that euphemistic
strategies would be more frequently used when translating the above taboo words
into Chinese version. As to the translation of taboo words, the translation
strategies used to render the three categories of taboo words are as follows:
literal translation, widening and omission. In the whole corpus, the most frequently
used translation strategy is literal translation, accounting for 88.6%, while
the euphemistic strategies, which include omission and widening, only account
for 11.4% in total.
Share and Cite:
Wu, S. and Wan, Q. (2021) Euphemistic Strategies Used in Subtitling English Taboo Expressions into Chinese: A Case Study of
Big Little Lies.
Open Journal of Social Sciences,
9, 397-406. doi:
10.4236/jss.2021.96027.
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