The Drastic Forces of Expletives Rendered into English Subtitles: A Discriminant Analysis

Audiovisual translation is inherently a complex phenomenon. This might partly be due to the high frequency of non-standard language, slangs, and expletives. In the meantime, audiovisual translation in general and subtitling in particular are forms of constrained translations. The translator should attend to many factors to represent the true character of the figures in the visual product, ranging from what they say, to how they say, to name a few. The translator may, consciously or unconsciously, change, neutralize, remove, or add, which consequently, in one way or another, alters the way the characters are viewed by the viewers. As such, the translators decision making is influenced by more than one single variable in each situation. Rather, multiple variables might be sufficient to describe their decision making. In an attempt to justify the translators decision-making in rendering expletives, this study examined how well a set of variables, such as the semantic field and function of the expletives, the role of the characters, and the role and gender of the addresses can predict the drastic force of the rendered expletive from Persian into English in the subtitle of Mokhtarnameh, as a historical-religious series. The discriminant analysis results indicated that 91% of variation in the drastic force of the English expletives can be accounted for by the negative or positive role of the expletive addresse. The results can be informative in how ideological assumptions of the translators might interfere with positioning the target viewers.