Well Fuck! A Comparative Case Study in DVD Subtitling: The Linguistic Transfer of Taboo Language in Reservoir Dogs from English into Dutch

Abstract

Quentin Tarantino’s film Reservoir Dogs (1992) contains many instances of overt taboo language. This includes words, subjects or concepts that are obscene, offensive or inappropriate in a given cultural context and are not to be spoken or expressed in front of the public eye, to prevent loss of face or cause offence. The aim of this contrastive study is to shed light on the linguistic transfer of taboo language of Reservoir Dogs. The crucial contrasts between the original English dialogue and the Dutch subtitles translation will be analysed both quantitatively and qualitatively by examining various linguistic functions, forms and strategies in translation. Taboo language in audiovisual translation is a vastly understudied area that is often overlooked by academia, despite the fact that swearing and the use of taboo language is natural to a culture’s discourse. In essence, the key motif is to examine what impact the Dutch culture, language and the medium-related constraints in subtitling have on the cross-cultural transfer of taboo language. The overall expectation is that omission of taboo words will be a very common occurrence due to medium-related constraints and the fact that a sizeable amount of swearwords may not be regarded as indispensable elements in subtitles. In fact, the vast reduction is not prompted by medium-related constraints and the translation becomes a toned down version, which lacks, which is stripped of connotation at times. The efforts of the translator to compensate for the observed reduction of taboo words prove to be insufficient. However, the presented results support the claim that taboos are culture-specific, since the source and target culture apparently do swear nonconformably.