Publications

Publication details [#67211]

Valdeón, Roberto A. and Qin Huang. 2019. Intercultural pragmatics and the translation of English interjections and expletives into Spanish and Chinese. Babel 65 (3) : 337–354.
Publication type
Article in journal
Publication language
English
Language as a subject
Place, Publisher
John Benjamins
Journal DOI
10.1075/babel

Annotation

This article aims to discuss the importance of pragmatics in translation, paying particular attention to the difficulties posed by two non-clausal units or inserts (Biber et al. 1999). These elements have been classified into nine categories, namely interjections, greetings and farewells, discourse markers, attention signals, response elicitors, response forms, hesitators, polite formulae and expletives. This article will discuss two of them, interjections and expletives, both of which express stance. It will consider the possible renderings of these elements in Spanish and Chinese and the difficulties they pose in the translation of fictional dialogue in connection with previous research into this issue in order to identify future lines of enquiry. As regards the translation of expletives, it seems that recent publications point towards a greater presence of swearwords in Spanish dubbed versions than in the past, referred to in this article as a “vulgarization hypothesis”.