El lenguaje malsonante y su traducción: comparación entre los doblajes de filmes anglófonos al italiano y al español

Swear words and expressions occur in social interaction and mostly perform an offensive function. In film, they convey emotional strength to dialogue and typify characters linguistically. In addition, they act as orality markers that contribute to creating natural and plausible audiovisual speech and make it closer to spontaneous spoken language. By drawing on a parallel corpus of five North-American films and their dubbing translations, the present study investigates and contrasts the degree of mitigation in the Italian and Spanish target versions, while comparing these to the original Anglophone texts. The frequency per minute of moderately, strongly and very strongly offensive swear words and expressions are calculated. The analysis of the data reveals that the Spanish versions contain a higher number of vulgar expressions than the Italian translations, which are conversely more prone to mitigation. These results parallel those obtained in a previous study that used the same methodology to compare Italian and Spanish domestic productions. Both sets of findings hint at a possible greater propensity in the Spanish than in the Italian culture to resort to swear words and expressions in filmic texts. However, strategies of ibridisation and domestication can be seen to play a role in the dubbing translation of swearing in both linguacultures