Geralt *grunts angrily*: Rethinking Taboo Translation Through Multimodality
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| Year of publication | 2026 |
| Type | Appeared in Conference without Proceedings |
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| Description | Do swearwords feel stronger when written than when spoken? Opinions differ, and audiovisual translation offers a productive space for testing this assumption. Informed by research in pragmatics and translation studies, this paper zooms in on reduction and softening strategies observed in English-to-Czech subtitles, and examines what happens when a spoken profanity encounters the formal and textual constraints of timed text, as well as the practical limitations stipulated by content-rating policies and internal style guides of major streaming platforms. Overall, the paper treats the translation of taboo language as a multimodal calibration shaped by both the scene and the wider institutional context, while also extending its reach into a didactic dimension. When used in the classroom, this framework consistently sparks active engagement: students create their own offensiveness rating scales, challenge one another’s categorisations, and test how multimodal cues influence these judgments. On this account, the paper positions itself at the intersection of theory, practice, and translation training, and reports on insights gained from a three-year integration of the proposed framework into a course within the Translation and Interpreting programme at Masaryk University. After all, nothing sparks sharper analytical thinking than a roomful of MA students dissecting the on-screen intensity of “fuck”. |
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