Framing Neapolitan swearwords in contemporary AVT scenario: swearing as lingua-cultural phenomenon

Flavia Cavaliere, Università degli Studi di Napoli Federico II

Citation: Cavaliere, Flavia (2019) “Framing Neapolitan swearwords in contemporary AVT scenario: swearing as lingua-cultural phenomenon”, mediAzioni 24, http://mediazioni.sitlec.unibo.it, ISSN 1974-4382.

1. Introduction

The phenomena of swearing and impoliteness “are impossible to define universally because all are culturally and personally determined” (Jay and Janschewitz 2008: 269)1. Additionally, swearing and cursing are often interchangeably used as umbrella terms and may include obscenities, profanities, blasphemy, name-calling, insulting, verbal aggression, taboo speech, ethnic-racial slurs, vulgarity, slang and scatology (Jay 2000: 9)2. Notwithstanding this confusion – most probably also a reflection of the academic neglect of this language domain – all swearwords (SWs) are ‘emotional’ words and are all closely linked to culture. Though not a global feature of human communication, swearing is a regular linguistic practice common to most societies and cultures, “as old as man and coeval with

1 The American Heritage Dictionary of the English Language (2000) establishes a taboo or swear word as a “ban or inhibition resulting from social custom or aversion”.

2 It might be useful to roughly distinguish between the concepts of swearwords, taboo words, slang and vulgarisms. As a general rule, swearwords are offensive words used intentionally to scorn someone. Taboo words and profanities, instead, are not just insults but proscribed words that are not accepted in a given society. Uttering them is generally perceived as an offence to the listener and they are used more frequently in oral speech than in written texts, though it is not unusual to find them in written language. Swearwords tend to be considered more offensive in written language than in oral language. Slang words and vulgarisms correspond to informal language expressions. However, henceforth, for brevity’s sake, the all-encompassing expression ‘swearword’ (SW) will be used to allude to potentially offensive language.

1 language” (Montagu 2001: 5). Most cultures have in fact their own taboo matters (Hughes 1998) depending on the hierarchy of values that are prevalent in a given society, and the strength of a taboo subject mirrors a community’s values and will therefore never be exactly the same from one to another. Accordingly, although there is great variation in what constitutes swearing in different cultures and how it is expressed, it is generally considered as rude and inappropriate language and, in the majority of languages, swearing seems to share similar patterns.

In most languages, swearing usually refers to things that are not to be talked about in public, and some forms of swearing/taboos – such as sex, religion, and defecation – appear to be quasi-universal “but not necessarily to the same degree within similar situations” (Baker 2001: 234). Unmentionable bodily functions and/or substances which generate repulsion are thus commonly considered inappropriate/unutterable in almost every formal register. For example, words for excrement can be found as common SWs in most European languages: ‘shit’ (English), ‘merde’ (French), ‘mierda’ (Spanish), ‘merda’ (Italian and Portuguese), ‘Scheisse’ (German), ‘szar’ (Hungarian), ‘skit’ (Swedish), etc. These SWs fall within the category of taboo words related to scatological referents and disgusting objects, including words and/or expressions concerning bodily waste and fluids (e.g. ‘shit’, ‘crap’, etc.). In most languages, SWs are connected with every aspect regarding sex, such as sexual organs, sexual practices, masturbation, homosexuality, and so on (e.g. the notorious four-letter words in English such as ‘cunt’, ‘fuck’, etc.). Ethnicity and race may represent other sources of taboo words as well, ‘nigger’ and ‘fag’ being ethnic/racial/gender insults3. Additionally, in many religions, the name of God must not be mentioned ‘in vain’, and expressions like ‘goddamn’, ‘Jesus Christ’, etc. are considered as blasphemy or profane. Likewise, because certain religions do not permit their believers to eat certain kinds of food/animals, in some languages, a number of words related to food have become taboo (‘bitch’,

3 These two categories, referring to certain bodily organs and functions, are considered as so- called ‘negative taboos’ since they are related to feelings of disgust and revulsion.

2 ‘pig’, etc.)4. Other semantic fields may concern mental and physical disabilities (‘retard’, ‘lard ass’, ‘lame’), ancestral allusions (‘son of a bitch’, ‘bastard’, etc.) or even death.

However, swearing, whatever one’s own personal attitudes are towards this phenomenon, is an intrinsic part of a language (Dewaele 2010; Ljung 2011) and any “structure of a language is a powerful tool for understanding a culture” (Sagarin 1968: 18). Therefore, the social and cultural significance of swearing must be acknowledged. Unquestionably, swearing is also increasingly becoming less marked as a sociolinguistic activity. It is no longer mostly constrained within face-to-face and/or private interpersonal settings, but it is progressively and routinely spreading into and being accepted in new domains including literature, television, films, social media, and so on (Henry 2006; Dynel 2012). As a consequence, in recent decades, the practice of swearing has begun receiving scholarly investigation, though it is still underrepresented in comparison to research on many other sociolinguistic areas5.

As mentioned before, swearing is influenced by the culture and the society to which the speakers belong, and SWs “are often used to express connotative meaning, such as the emotional overtones of [the] word, the feelings, moods, attitudes and power that is comprehended along with the denotative referent” (Jay 1992: 10). As such, their meaning changes according to the situation in which they are used. In particular, crucial elements in decoding SWs are the social locations where the dialogue takes place (Trudgill and Andersson 1990) and the relationships between the characters involved in the speech act (Jay and Janschewitz 2008: 272-3; Jay 2009: 154). The personal relationship

4 These are generally deemed ‘positive taboos’ since they are associated with the names of powerful beings and with feelings of fear or awe, though their misuse is also regarded as sinful in many religions.

5 Research conducted on swearing to date has focused on sociolinguistic variables including, apart from gender (see footnote 6), age (Jay 1992, 1996; Jay and Janschewitz 2008; Jay et al. 2006; Rathje 2014) and socioeconomic status (Hughes 1992; Hughes 1998; McEnery 2004). There are also studies that have explored swearing in specific contexts such as in the workplace (Baruch and Jenkins 2007; Faulkner 2009; Johnson and Lewis 2010; Stone et al. 2010, 2015) or in the media (Cressman et al. 2009; Kaye and Sapolsky 2004, 2009; Sapolsky and Kaye 2005).

3 between the interlocutors in fact plays an important role in the use of SWs: the number of SWs used is proportional to the degree of familiarity between the participants, and the more familiar this relation is, the more SWs may be used. Additionally, in terms of gender, SWs are more likely to be used in male- dominated contexts since men tend to use more SWs than women6. Another important factor related to swearing concerns the (non-)native character of the speaker since native speakers are keener to swear compared to non-native speakers (Dewaele 2004). More importantly, whether or not an SW is perceived as an offence or insult depends on what is considered as appropriate for the participants. “The emotional impact of swearing depends on one’s experience with culture and its language conventions” (Jay and Janschewitz 2008: 267). Furthermore, it must be remembered that in every communicative act, the connotative meaning that is intended to be communicated mainly relies on the intentions and the attitude of the speaker. In spite of having a different denotation, if the speaker does wish to offend someone, almost every word could become offensive, since “practically all words may serve the swearer as makeweight” (Montagu 2001: 100). However, SWs are commonly uttered to state connotative meaning and can accomplish different pragmatic functions in conversational language (Pujol 2006: 123; Wang 2013: 72; Pluszczyk and Świątek 2016: 120).

“The main purpose of swearing is to express emotions. […] Swear words are well suited to express emotion as their primary meanings are connotative” (Jay and Janschewitz 2008: 267)7. Speakers use them mainly to express their negative feelings and attitudes, which may include anger, surprise, disappointment, regret, exasperation, aggression, and so on (Jay 2000: 81). SWs can also be uttered to release tension when something unexpected and unpleasant occurs, thus performing a ‘cathartic function’ through which people

6 See studies carried out by Crawford (1995), Berger (2003), Stapleton (2003, 2010), Jay (2005), Thelwall (2008), Faulkner (2009), Murphy (2011), Beers Fägersten (2012), Murray (2012) and Coates (2015).

7 Pujol (2006: 123) maintains that taboo words cannot be classified in only one pragmatic category according to the emotion that the speaker is trying to show; instead, they can overlap and express more than one feeling at the same time.

4 could relieve excessive nervous energy in a very straightforward way and restore their emotional balance (Wajnryb 2005; Ghassempur 2009). The actual SW used with this type of swearing is functionally unimportant, which is emphasised by the secondary meaning of ‘swear-word’ as “any syllable, word or phrase conveying no independent meaning, especially one inserted in a line of verse for the sake of the meter” (Collins English Dictionary 2003: 577). While cathartic swearing does not necessarily require an addressee, ‘abusive’ swearing – aiming to insult or inflict harm – is uttered against a chosen target, generally (an)other human being(s)8. A third type of swearing – the most common swearing pattern (Crystal 1995: 173) – is social swearing. In this case, SWs are neither used as an emotional release nor as an insult, but to mark social distance or social solidarity or to shock and/or to assert one’s identity in a group to construct personal and group-based identities (Baruch and Jenkins 2007; Beers Fägersten 2007; Coyne et al. 2012; Dutton 2007; Murphy 2011; Stapleton 2003; Stenström 2006; Thelwall 2008) or to enact power roles (Ainsworth 2016; Carroll-Garrison 2012; Johnson 2010; McNally et al. 2005). In all these cases, social SWs are basically used as rhetoric tools to achieve a certain reaction from the hearer. Some people(s) may use SWs more frequently than others but swearing is a phase most teens go through as a way to assert their independence. Regardless of their socioeconomic status, teens tend to opt for SWs in their own language and, accordingly, their most popular fictional characters are the most foul-mouthed (Collins 2012; Coyne et al 2012). Nonetheless, swearing can also be related to various other causes, including psychological9 and even neurological ones10. Yet a common folk-linguistic assumption about swearing is that it is evidence of the speakers’

8 Cathartic and abusive swearing can of course occur in combination.

9 Psychological factors depend on the personal experience of the speaker; the most common ones include anger, religiosity, sexual anxiety, verbal aggressiveness, and Type A personality (Martin and Anderson 1997; Jay 2000, 2005; Deffenbacher et al. 2004; Rancer and Avtgis 2006;Vingerhoets et al. 2013).

10 Swearing episodes can be consciously done on purpose or unconsciously in an uncontrollable way. Some neurological factors relate neurobiology to emotional language use, and excessive swearing has been associated with neurological illnesses and/or neurodevelopmental disorders such as Tourette syndrome (Jay 2000; La Pointe 2006).

5 underdeveloped vocabulary/language and that it lowers their linguistic register. Swearing is in fact a feature commonly linked to working-class culture, lower socioeconomic groupings, and vernacular or informal speech11. As a consequence, swearing is an unmistakable sign of a low/non-standard register and has traditionally been stigmatised as something which devalues one’s register and should thus be avoided. Yet research has shown that SWs play an important, even necessary, role in both everyday language and behaviour.

Jay and Janschewitz (2013) recorded over 10,000 episodes of public swearing by children and adults, and their work demonstrates that public swearing generally does not occur in anger and never leads to physical violence; instead, most uses of SWs are innocuous or produce positive consequences (e.g. humour elicitation when used positively for joking or storytelling, stress management, fitting in with the crowd, or as a substitute for physical aggression)12. SWs can in fact also be employed to convey positive emotions like amazement, happiness, or excitement (Crawford 1995: 32-33) or to provide emphasis, to express humour, and even to amuse.

It is undeniable that there are certain situations in which no other words are more appropriate, and research has also demonstrated that sometimes SWs can communicate emotions in an easier and quicker way than non-taboo words, which debunks the “poverty-of-vocabulary assumption” and reveals that swearing fluency associates positively with overall fluency (Jay and Jay 2015). However, ethical judgements on the use of SWs are not taken into consideration within the scope of this paper.

11 See Baruch and Jenkins (2007); Bayard and Krishnayya (2001); Beers Fägersten (2007); Benwell (2001); Cheshire (1982); Hughes (1992); Romaine (1999).

12 Research has shown that swearing is associated with enhanced pain tolerance (Stephens et al. 2009, Stone 2010; Stephens and Umland 2011; Dong 2010).

6 2. Introducing the corpus and the aim

The present study is an analysis of the different translation strategies chosen to render SWs from Italian into English, conducted on a comparative, descriptive, non-judgemental basis, and carried out by analysing the Italian audio script of the Italian feature film Gomorra (Matteo Garrone, 2008) and the homonymous Italian TV series (Sky Italia, 2014-), both based on the eponymous book authored by Roberto Saviano. The English subtitles used in the analysis are taken from the Italian DVDs for both the film and the TV series.

As is known, in 200613 the Neapolitan journalist and writer Roberto Saviano published a controversial bestseller14 about the power and reach of the Camorra, the drug-fuelled Neapolitan mafia. The subsequent film and TV series15 have been as successful as the book16, though key structural and narrative differences can be found between them. The narrative persona at the centre of the book is clearly absent from both screen adaptations17, but while

13 The book has been adapted for the Italian stage as well.

14 Gomorra(h) is actually a blend of fiction and facts that coalesces into a form of writing and so, when it was first published in Italy, it was labelled as ‘docufiction’, ‘nonfiction’, or a ‘work of investigative writing’, all titles that suggested that Saviano, in his exhaustive investigation, had taken liberties with his first-person accounts.

15 Henceforth respectively indicated as Gomorra(h) and TV Gomorra(h) when necessary to distinguish between the film and the TV series; otherwise, for brevity’s sake, both the film and the TV series will be reported together as ScnG(h), which stands for Screen Gomorra(h).

16 The film – directed by Matteo Garrone, who shares the screenwriting credits with Saviano himself, Maurizio Braucci, Ugo Chiti, Gianni Di Gregorio and Massimo Gaudioso – was released in Italy in May 2008 and boasts an impeccable record of awards. Among its many prizes, it won the Grand Prix at the 61st Annual Cannes Film Festival in 2008, and in 2009 it was chosen as Italy's Official Submission for the Best Foreign Language Film Category of the 81st Annual Academy Awards (Metacritic 2009). The TV series, meanwhile, initially directed by Stefano Sollima, Francesca Comencini, Claudio Cupellini and Claudio Giovannesi, first aired on the Sky Italia network on 6 May 2014 and has run for four seasons. In Italy, the series is Sky’s most- watched cable show, with the fourth series bringing in an average audience of 1,007,024 viewers, but it is globally successful and has also been sold in 190 countries worldwide (De Marco 2016; Anderson 2019).

17 Garrone altered the original narrative structure of the book and, once he had selected several episodes, he developed the plot along five narrative strands, each of which focused on a particular character: Don Ciro, the colourless clan bagman who distributes pay-outs to loyal 7 the film unmistakably subverts the Hollywood thematic stylisation of violence and the consequent glorification of the criminal lifestyle18, the TV series has received harsh criticism on the grounds of its extreme violence: “Roberto Saviano’s best-selling 2007 book, “Gomorrah”, his reportage about the Neapolitan crime syndicate the Camorra, was dark. Matteo Garrone’s award- winning 2009 film adaptation was darker. And the hit Italian television series of the same name is by far the darkest” (Donadio 2016). More importantly, according to some critics, the TV series stirs up violence and offers negative role models since, according to Italian statesmen and even national anti-mafia and state prosecutors, the characters are depicted as being so likeable as to make them seem attractive19.

However, in the whole world of Gomorra(h), there is no such thing as punishment for crime and the social order no longer seems to exist.

relatives of imprisoned gang members; Totò, the sensitive yet unflinching 13-year-old who delivers groceries for pocket money and who yearns to join the mob; Marco and Ciro, who naively seek to become crime lords themselves before they are sentenced to death; the smart- suited Franco, who arranges for rich enterprises in the North to dump their toxic waste discreetly in the districts of Campania; and Pasquale, the talented tailor who works for a Camorra-funded factory. In his multi-narrative approach, the only connections between these characters are their roles in the machinations of Naples’ far-reaching criminal culture and its terrifying stranglehold on those involved, whether participants or victims. In the TV series, many (and some new) characters are gradually introduced: Genny and Pietro (Savastano), Ciro (Di Marzio), Imma, ‘Malammore’ (Bad Love), ‘Scianel’ (misspelling of ‘Chanel’), Patrizia, Azzurra, ‘Sangueblù’ (Blue Blood), ’o Diplomato’ (the Graduate), ’o Crezi’ (the Crazy One), ‘Mickey’, and ’o Vucabulà’ (the Vocabulary). The names in italics are nicknames which, as explained by Saviano in his book, are used by camorristi to mark their membership of ‘the System’. The first series sets out with Gennaro (Genny) Savastano’s decision to become the new boss of the crime syndicate and take over ‘the System’, which will ignite an internal ruthless power struggle that will put his and his entire family’s lives at risk. However, narrating the developments and the intricacies of the four series is definitely beyond the scope of this study.

18 Garrone deliberately set out to demythologise the mobsters, refusing Hollywood’s thematic stylisation of violence and the consequent glorification of the criminal lifestyle, and explained: “in reading Saviano’s book, I discovered there was the possibility to change in some way the conception of the Mafia movie. It was very interesting to go in the opposite way of that model” (Mottram 2008).

19 Among the many articles written about the topic, see for instance Cuommo (2017) and Mezzofiore (2019).

8 Unlike the conventional views of organised crime perpetuated by the genre, the criminals of ‘Gomorra(h)’ have no code of honour or rules of conduct and not even family ties provide codes of loyalty. […] Crime is presented as the career of choice for young people in a place where no other opportunities exist and where nobody can remain innocent but must be either criminal or victim. (Cavaliere 2010: 176)

Nonetheless, in order to maximise the realism, both the film’s and the TV series’ directors used a plain and unadorned cinematic style where scenes are mainly shot in the actual suburbs of Scampia, on the outskirts of Naples20, where the language spoken is mainly the Neapolitan dialect21. The Neapolitan dialect, however, created such difficulties for Italian viewers themselves22 that in Italy the film was released with subtitles in both standard Italian and English23, while the TV series intended for English-speaking countries only provides the original Neapolitan dialogue with standard English subtitles, as discussed in more detail further on.

However, due to the content(s) and the violent themes of the plot, the scripts often require the (main) characters’ language to be violent and transgressive, i.e. a mobster’s language is highly coloured by the above-mentioned abusive and social swearing. In the underworld context, it is not only particularly telling for violent insults, but it also proves to be highly instrumental in asserting one’s

20 While the film is basically set in Naples (with the only exception of some scenes set in Venice), the series is filmed in different Italian locations and abroad as well, including places like Bulgaria and Honduras.

21 According to a controversial (and often misinterpreted) UNESCO document published in 2010 on endangered languages, Neapolitan, as a South Italian language, enjoys “together with Sicilian and to a lesser extent Corsican, a relatively stable position as the vernaculars of their communities” (Salminen 2010: 39). For an in-depth analysis of this document in relation to South Italian language(s) and Neapolitan, see De Blasi and Montuori (2018: 587-593).

22 The Neapolitan language is rather different from standard Italian in its grammar and pronunciation, and presents interesting influences from Spanish and French and, to a lesser extent, Arabic and Greek.

23 English subtitles are provided not only in Italy and English-speaking countries (i.e. the U.K, the USA, the Anglophone Canada, Australia, etc.) but also in countries like India and Singapore in the so-called ‘Outer Circle’ (Kachru 1992: 356), where English plays an important ‘second language’ role in a multilingual setting.

9 identity and enacting one’s power role(s). This made ScnG(h) particularly revealing for my research aims.

As mentioned, the use of expletives is a relatively new subject for scholarly research, having long been ignored or judged to be inappropriate or undeserving of scientific investigation (Beers Fägersten 2012: 19). However, even though there seems to be a growing interest in the subject, studies of SWs in AVT to date, i.e. “the translation of transient polysemiotic texts presented on screen to mass audiences” (Gottlieb 2008: 205-206), are still limited.

Skewed, traditional perceptions of AVT have somehow also led to the idea that the only cultural artefacts within AVT worthy of analysis and research – and for that matter, worthy of inclusion in publications for training purposes and in educational curricula – are fiction films. However, we only need to watch a bit of television, surf the internet, or peruse the DVD shelves of megastores to ascertain that there are many more genres and programmes that are also subtitled, dubbed or voicedover, and that these too deserve to be the object of scholarly analyses. Examples are sitcoms, cartoons, documentaries, corporate videos, commercials, educational and edutainment productions, video games, cookery and property programmes, interviews and fly-on-the-wall docudramas, to name but a few. It is evident that the way in which we interact has changed and is constantly changing still, the main move being that from the page to the screen as text carrier, and these changes in their turn create new communication needs. In this sense, the impressive development of technology has played a crucial role. In brief, we must view translation, and especially audio-visual translation as a more flexible, more heterogeneous phenomenon, one that is able to accommodate a broader range of empirical realities, to subsume new and potential translation activities within its boundaries and that therefore also calls for adapted research methods. (Díaz Cintas 2009: 6)

More specifically, even though the art of subtitling has been around since the beginning of the ‘talkies’ in the late 1920s, research of SWs in subtitles has increased quite considerably only in quite recent times24. Hence, further research in this field is required, especially as far as the Italian scenario is concerned, and the present study attempts to fill this gap.

24 See, among others, Cavaliere 2008a, 2008b, 2010, 2012; Bannon 2013; Baños et al. 2013; Bruti 2009; Díaz Cintas and Remael 2007; Chiaro 2008, 2012; Díaz Cintas, 2009, 2010; Gottlieb 2001, 2004, 2008; Guillot 2008, 2010; 2012; Mattson 2006; Pedersen 2005, 2007, 2008, 2011; Taylor 2000, 2009; Romero-Fresco and Martínez 2015; Raffi 2017. 10

3. Swearwords in AVT

The cultural implications for translation range from lexical content and syntax to ideologies and modes of living in a given culture, including genre expectations. When translating and adapting a text for the screen, in fact, the option between the two language transfer methods influences the translator’s different choices. The problems inherent in all translations are at their most evident in subtitling because of the particular in-built constraints of the medium.

First, as noted by Hatim and Mason (1997: 78), subtitling is a cross-medium activity, rendering spoken language as written. In this way, certain features of speech such as dialect, emphatic devices including intonation, code-switching and so on are not automatically represented and, in contrast to other static written modes of communication, readers cannot back-track in the text in order to retrieve meaning. Furthermore, the medium imposes additional constraints to those of other forms of writing, namely ‘formal’ (quantitative) and ‘textual’ (qualitative) constraints (Gottlieb 1992: 164). They are both consequent upon the limitations imposed by space (each subtitle shown on the screen cannot be longer than two lines; moreover, each of those lines cannot contain more than 39 characters – spaces and punctuation marks included) and time factors. The latter basically stands for synchronisation constraints, which require that subtitles follow the dialogue and the cuts of the video in order to retain the audiovisual balance. Following the general rule, captions only remain on screen for a maximum of 7-8 seconds.

Additionally, in a subtitled film, the text has to maintain temporal synchrony with the image, which imposes further limitations on translators. Because space is so limited, the physical space taken up by a single letter becomes significant (e.g. more space is taken up for ‘m’ and ‘w’ than for ‘t’ or ‘l’) and this may affect the words selected for the subtitle and so potentially erode the relationship between words and picture/words and meaning. However, apart from the space and time constraints, the choice between dubbing or subtitling can also influence its reception in other cultures and countries since, when translating

11 subtitles, professionals will also have to consider the switching of the mode – from oral to written. Subtitles are a language written to be spoken – in Chaume Varela’s definition of “oralidad prefabricada” (prefabricated orality) (2009: 78) – and in written language, SWs tend to be perceived as more offensive and ruder than in oral language, as will be explained later on. Nonetheless, as said above, from an AVT perspective, the many parameters that influence translators’ complex decision-making processes of the cultural adaptation of SWs have seldom been investigated to date. It has long been recognised that “in a language, everything is culturally produced, beginning with language itself” (Franco Aixelá 1996: 58). Yet, there are some words or concepts that are among the most culture-specific parts of any language, or its “culture bumps” (Leppihalme 1997), and as such always require translators’ serious consideration.

SWs may be typically included among such culture-bound terms, and as such pose predictable, sometimes insurmountable, difficulties for translators and can lead to “translation crisis points”, i.e. make translators “stop and think a bit harder, and actively decide what translation strategy to use” (Pedersen 2005: 5). SWs, along with slang and some food terms, represent a typical and colourful part of casual and colloquial dialogue serving the same purpose, i.e. they function as vehicles of self-expression. Accordingly, due to their context- reliant nature and varied usage, from a translational point of view, both idioms and SWs are bound to challenge a translator’s sociolectal competence and can be approached in a similar manner.

When translating SWs, translators must correctly decode all their crucial sociocultural components. As already mentioned, the pragmatic functions that SWs can perform are quite varied, so the translator must unveil the speaker’s feelings when uttering the SW. Translators’ work is to always take into account that the different “reasons for using […] taboo words depend on the conversational goals of the speaker” (Jay 2009: 155). To give just one example, exclaiming ‘Holy shit’ is normally meant to show surprise, while ‘You fucking piece of shit’ is normally uttered out of anger in order to offend the hearer. Thus, in the SW translation process, the same expression/term is seldom rendered

12 identically in each and every context in which it appears. Therefore, when the term ‘shit’ is used because of surprise, such as in ‘Holy shit!’, it could be translated into Italian as ‘cazzo’ or ‘minchia’ [lit. dick], while as an intended offence it could become ‘Maledetto pezzo di merda’ [You fucking piece of shit]. When the SWs are used in such a connotative way (that is to say, in order to insult, blaspheme, curse or swear), these words are meant to maintain the connotation of the term as much as possible, rather than its denotative meaning, in its translation.

Other extremely significant elements to be analysed in the rendering of SWs from one language into another are the social environment in which the character is uttering the given expression and the addressee.

Needless to say, a vast array of possible AV translation strategies exists, with all taxonomies following a broad-spectrum progression along an axis oriented from Source-to-Target. The extremes of this scale represent tendencies or general strategies in relation to which each translation procedure is situated according to its degree of cultural mediation. Both the extreme points of those axes and the strategies themselves are given different names by different scholars. Nonetheless, all these strategies can be grouped into two macro- categories (Leppihalme 1997): Minimum Change Strategies, which add no new material to the TT rendering of the ST and include Retention or Borrowing, and Equivalent and Direct Translation; and Interventional Strategies – which may be summarised as Generalisation, Substitution or Transposition, and Omission – which supply the TT audience with more information to help access the culture bump(s) under scrutiny. However, all these translation strategies may either combine or overlap, which makes it difficult to categorise them accurately within a given body of work.

The main strategies used by translators when dealing with the rendering of heavily culture-laden words/expression like SWs are generally Literal Translation – which consists of using the formal equivalent of the SW in the TL – and Retention or Borrowing when original terms from the ST are used in the TT.

13 However, other options are often required, based either on the degree of non- equivalence at both the word level and pragmatic level (Baker 2001: 26-42) or the lack of equivalents for certain SWs between two particular languages (Surià 2012). Seemingly common concepts or even the same word may evoke different semantic associations owing to cultural and socio-geographical differences. Translating ‘bitch’ into the equivalent for ‘female dog’ in the TL (‘cagna’), for example, would not work properly. Furthermore, SWs offer plenty of picture-perfect examples of culture-laden elements, which, as a major component of cultural systems, are deeply imbued with plenty of sociocultural meanings. These are somehow predictably reflected in the terminology and explain why, from a translational point of view, SWs offer many examples of “referential vacuums” (Álvarez 1991: 164), i.e. lexical items with no ethnographic correspondence in the target culture. SWs may also be translated by a superordinate or more general word (Generalisation). This is one of the most common strategies for dealing with many types of non-equivalence, particularly in the area of propositional meaning. Translators may also opt to Paraphrase using a related word, not only when the SL concept expressed is lexicalised in the TL in a different form, but also when the frequency with which a certain form is used in the ST is significantly higher than would be natural in the TL. Another common strategy is Transposition or “category shift” (Han and Wang 2014: 9), which basically entails a change in the grammatical category while the taboo component is preserved.

Another translation strategy (Substitution or Equivalence) may involve replacing a culture-specific SL item or expression with an item having a similar meaning and function in the TL culture and which is likely to have a similar impact on the TL reader. Where the translation is specifically adjusted to the TL culture in an attempt to evoke similar connotations to the original, the cultural substitution used is Adaptation. As mentioned, subtitlers also have to evaluate the possible impact that the translation may have on the TL culture audience beforehand; in fact, especially in the field of subtitling, when translated into another language, SWs are very often toned down (Han and Wang 2014). Accordingly, another option frequently opted for is Softening (or ‘deswearing’, or ‘mollification’). The translator renders the SL SW into a more neutral or softer TL word. The English

14 sentence ‘You’ll never win that fucking prize’, for instance, once the translator has opted for Softening, might be translated into Italian as ‘non vincerai mai quel maledetto premio’ [You will never win that fucking prize], where the meaning remains the same but is expressed in a less rude way than in the English text (‘maledetto’ being a less aggressive and more acceptable term compared to ‘fottuto’, which is generally a translation of ‘fucking’ as an adjective).

Last but not least, the already-mentioned subtitling requirement for conciseness often forces translators to tend to Simplification (Marleau 1982: 274) or even Omission, i.e. the SW is totally deleted. SWs are rarely fundamental for the understanding of the plot, and when the meaning conveyed by a particular item or expression simply performs the role of filler in communication or is not vital enough to the development of the text to justify distracting the reader with lengthy explanations, translators tend to omit translating the word or expression in question. The English sentence ‘Are you fucking mad?’ might easily be translated into Italian as ‘Ma sei pazzo?’, ignoring the presence of the swearword ‘fucking’ on the grounds of its being redundant, since it is not considered critical for the meaning of that sentence. Quite paradoxically, as Hjort explains (2009: 4), “many translators consider the omission of swearwords a better strategy than mollification, as viewers may react negatively to the mild words when used as equivalents of stronger original expressions”. Nonetheless, as a general rule,

colloquialisms and conversational markers […] convey important information about the level of formality involved and the relations between the speakers, are often left untranslated, and this can considerably modify interpersonal dynamics. Minor subtractions and omissions of culture- specific references in single episodes, which may appear insignificant, can, however, drastically alter meanings and affect comprehension of further episodes. (Cavaliere 2008a: 171)

Accordingly, Omission is generally used only after testing and rejecting all other options (Leppihalme 1997: 93) even though, on some occasions, it may also be due to deliberate censoring, as some information might be not shown intentionally. Translators’ choices are in fact basically largely dependent on how much liberty they are given in their translation and on the purpose and the 15 target reader of their translation (what may be acceptable in the SL culture, for instance, may not be so in the TL culture). Expletives in the source language may not be considered as such in the target language, or, vice versa, words which are considered as taboo or SWs in the source culture may be translated using words that are not taboo in the target culture.

4. Methodological approach

In my investigation, a three-step procedure was followed: viewing the source material, transcribing the Neapolitan utterances of the film/TV episodes together with the English subtitles of each episode containing SWs25, and, finally, examining the strategies used to translate these terms26. Corpora were disregarded since these research tools have their own limitations, as they do not enable an investigation of the subtitles in their natural multisemiotic form, making it difficult to determine certain sociopragmatic factors. Hence, a model of analysis that considers their linguistic form as well as the context and the communicative intention would be appropriate here, since corpora generally do not offer statistics regarding the different uses (and ST counterparts) of a given word. As mentioned before, SWs are not only particularly context-dependent, but the same word may have more than just one grammatical category, which requires it to be manually analysed. In English, for instance, terms like ‘fuck’ – which is the most used morphological variant to the English language (Rojo and Valenzuela 2000: 209; Pujol 2006: 124) – or ‘shit’ can perform the role of a noun, adjective, or interjection, as the examples will show. This implies that when it comes to studying the translation strategies of SWs, all the bilingual

25 Henceforth, Neapolitan utterances taken from the corpus under investigation will be indicated in italics and their English subtitled versions in square brackets.

26 As explained above, while in Italy the film Gomorra was released in the original Neapolitan dialect with subtitles in standard Italian, DVD versions of ScnG(h) have been released with different options, including subtitles in standard Italian and English. The TV series intended for English-speaking countries, instead, only offer the original Neapolitan dialogue and English subtitles. This is the reason why I decided to analyse only Neapolitan dialect swearing and the English translations as they appear in the English subtitles – either in the film or in the TV series – since no standard Italian could be analysed for the latter.

16 units had to be manually analysed in context and then categorised, even though this was an extremely time-consuming task. Consequently, pragmatic factors were duly taken into consideration when analysing the different translation strategies of SWs. The translation strategies were analysed mainly following Pedersen’s (2011) and Han and Wang’s (2014) proposed frameworks (as introduced in the previous section).

5. Coping with the Neapolitan dialect and English subtitles

Language – more specifically, the Neapolitan dialect – is a key element in ScnG(h) since the use of dialect is a fundamental way in which characters and their (sub)culture are implied and represented. In fact, while on the one hand the incidence of Neapolitan dialect in some areas of Southern Italy is recognised as an intangible cultural heritage that inspired many great poets and (song)writers and whose historical relevance is largely cherished27, on the other hand, the Neapolitan dialect can also be seen as a rather derogatory social marker, a sign of a lower class, and habitually associated with uneducated people who do not have a good command of the Italian language and/or, more importantly, the underworld.

In ScnG(h), many of the main characters are largely inarticulate, particularly in the film, where the more deeply characters are involved in the mentality of the Mob, the more uneducated they appear to be28. Hence, in ScnG(h), Neapolitan

27 Classic Neapolitan songs such as ‘O Sole Mio’ and ‘Funiculì Funiculà’ are globally known and sung, and Pino Daniele – the Neapolitan singer and songwriter who passed away in 2015 – performed with the world’s most famous artists in the most prestigious places, such as the Olympia in Paris, notwithstanding the intensive of Neapolitan in his songs. Likewise, not only in the 19th century but also even more recently, two of the most famous Neapolitan actors, namely Totò and Massimo Troisi, use Neapolitan in their nationally viewed works. For an in-depth analysis of the Neapolitan dialect, see De Blasi (2012).

28 Most of the main characters in Gomorra(h) “seem to be functionally illiterate; when attempting to speak standard Italian, Marco mispronounces the word dappertutto [everywhere] and says ‘dapettutto’; likewise, ‘troppo’ [too much] becomes ‘troppo assai’, which in Italian is an ungrammatical form; Totò, in his turn, uses the incorrect ‘propeto’ instead of ‘proprio’ [really]. Again, however, English subtitles do not convey any of the characters’ uneducated and grammatically limited parlance” (Cavaliere 2010: 181). 17 appears as an unavoidable language choice for them and features almost as a character on its own.

Yet if the choice of subtitling helps to maintain the integrity of the original performance so that the ebb and flow of the language and the inflections and authenticity of characters’ voices are preserved, English subtitles unavoidably deprive ScnG(h) of much of its realism and authenticity29, all the more so because the subtitles are mainly in standard English rather than the sort of colloquial, regional, or immigrant-inflected American variants that have been employed in the Hollywood gangster tradition. Particularly in the film, both national/regional and social variants from the Italian text – including the Neapolitan dialect, dialect from Caserta30, East European languages, Chinese and Northern Italian accents, or any illiterate forms – are all replaced with standard English, even though “[d]ialectal usage, swearing, deviant grammar or even inarticulacy help set the context of culture, and both dubbing and subtitling techniques should be called upon to provide some clues” (Taylor 2000: 318). ScnG(h) English subtitles instead resort to an inclusive language, i.e. language that does not represent people on the basis of gender, place of birth, age, or social status; consequently, other important social and cultural markers like class-related accents and ethnic or geographical dialects are totally neutralised, notwithstanding their relevance in depicting characters and/or communicating underlying messages.

Actually, the rendering of regional and/or social varieties represents one of the most challenging obstacles in translation, which explains why such a standard language is the most common option, and

29 This becomes particularly relevant in the film with its double-step of a linguistic translation from Neapolitan into both standard Italian and English subtitles.

30 In the film, for instance, one of the powerful local bosses is mocked for his dialect from Caserta, which sounds unintelligible to those who are used to the Neapolitan one. Ciro and Marco, the young wannabe gangsters, repeat his sentences while laughing at him, but the code-switching between the two dialects is obviously lost in the subtitling, together with all the pragmatic values of the whole scene, i.e. two teenagers who dare to make fun of the gruesome high-ranking crime boss.

18 As a general rule, translators tend to reject the option of dialect-for-dialect translation, given the relative impossibility of finding a vernacular form in the target language with features identical to or even approximating those present in another, vernacular forms being, by nature, geographically and socially idiosyncratic. (Mével 2007: 54)

Bartoll (2009: 4) suggests that all variants and the passage from dialect to standard language might reasonably be signalled with the addition of sentences uttered in dialect within brackets, or by resorting to the use of different colours or italics for all the secondary languages, while according to Taylor (1998: 144) a possible solution “may lie in simply using a restricted code […], a limited number of verbal items, the inarticulateness and limited range of lexis in the source language”. In the cases under scrutiny, much can be lost in the double translation from written text to film subtitle and from dialect to standard English – or, indeed, to any other language. In ScnG(h), for instance, non-Italian audiences who are unfamiliar with the sounds and rhythms of standard Italian might not even be aware that the characters are making extensive use of dialect since in the film Neapolitan is basically rendered into standard English.

6. Analysing some qualitative data

Swearing, as seen, is mainly a sociolinguistic phenomenon which encompasses and/or depends on diverse cultural, psychological, emotional and neurological issues. Additionally, swearing as a lingua-cultural phenomenon is also strictly dependent on context and as such can be sanctioned, restricted (or even accepted) according to gender and/or situations. Clear, though quite paradoxical and, to a certain extent, even hilarious, examples of swearing etiquette can be found in two different scenes from the first season of the TV series. As stated, gender also plays an important role in social swearing, not only because research demonstrates that men are keener to use SWs than women, but also because swearing itself tends to be considered as a symbol of masculinity which is to be avoided in a woman’s presence as a mark of respect. This sexist standpoint is often (re)stated by ScnG(h)’s characters both implicitly and explicitly, such as in a scene where Pietro Savastano, the ruthless Camorra

19 clan leader, is having a ‘working’ meeting with his henchmen. When Donna Imma, his wife, enters the room and overhears Gennaro De Rosa, one of Pietro’s henchmen, saying, “nun è ca me fa piacere si Conte m’’o mette n’ata vota ’n culo” 31 → [I don’t want Conte up my ass again], her husband scolds De Rosa for his coarse language and says, “De Ro’, per prima cosa, ’e pparole, ci sta na signora” → [De Rosa first of all watch your mouth, there’s a lady], but then he himself, notwithstanding his wife’s presence, goes on to say, “Genna’, io so’ sicuro che Conte ha capito ch’’o strunzo nun l’adda fà. Miette stu cazzo ’e parametro e vire ca vinci l’appalto” → [Second, I am sure Conte learned he shouldn’t be an asshole. Make the bid the surveyor says, and you’ll win the job].

Even though the English version paraphrases and, to a certain extent, deswears Pietro’s utterance by partially omitting his SWs, the quite whimsical effect of the whole scene is nonetheless kept. Later on, when the Savastanos are having dinner and their twenty-year-old son says, “Pecché nun ce crero ca nun sapive nu cazzo” → [I don’t fucking believe he didn’t know], Donna Imma – the mother – reproaches him by saying, “Sti pparole a tavola!” → [Don’t swear at the table]. She tries to ape upper-class habits, and, in quite a dark, sarcastic vision, it seems that in western cultures, swearing, unlike torturing or killing people32, is definitely considered inappropriate when having lunch. Hence, the translation of SWs requires subtitlers to cope not only with cultural differences (native speakers, for example, learn about swearing etiquette, about how, when and with whom it is appropriate or not to use SWs) but also with the pragmatic value of the utterance(s), not to mention the above-cited time and space constraints imposed by the medium itself. This explains why, if from a general viewpoint “translation is a battlefield of many opposing strategies and views” (Paloposki and Oittinen 2000: 375), the same SW, once subtitled, may be

31 In the written transcription of all the following Neapolitan quotes/terms, reference has been made to criteria for a graphical reproduction of the Neapolitan dialect as shown by De Blasi and Montuori (forthcoming). My heartfelt thanks to professor De Blasi who generously revised my transcriptions of the Neapolitan utterances reported in this article.

32 Among the many violent and bloody scenes, ScnG(h) features, for example, scenes in which a man has his hand cut at a lunch for a birthday party, people are killed while having coffee in a bar, and so on.

20 rendered with a range of particularly varied translation strategies, as some qualitative examples will show.

The most frequently used SW present in the Italian corpus is merda, which literally translates as ‘shit’. More generally, this has become a largely standardised word both in Italian and English, as it is kind of impolite but without strong connotations and is not considered to imply profanity. Due to its morphological variants, it can be commonly found in different collocations, and like the more offensive word ‘fuck’, the SWs merda/shit are often used figuratively to express different meanings than the literal one. As a consequence, merda is rendered in the English subtitles in many different ways according to contexts and pragmatic functions. In the following example, both in the original Neapolitan sentence and in the English subtitle, the expletive equates the insulted person with the literal meaning of the term: “Stu piezz’’e mmerda se permette ’e venirmi a minacciare” → [This piece of shit threatens me]. The case of “Po’ hann’accumminciato a fà schifezze” is slightly different, where although the original Neapolitan sentence does not employ an SW as such but rather a colloquial term, i.e. schifezze (whose general meaning could be ‘disgusting things’), the English subtitle does → [Then they started messing around with shit]. In this case, ‘shit’ again refers to its denotative level. Additionally, this sentence exemplifies one of the frequent cases in which, contrary to what might be expected, it is the English subtitled version that introduces an SW that was not uttered in the original Neapolitan dialogue. Another example of this could be the phrase ‘Porca miseria’ → [Holy shit]. Here, as the term ‘shit’ is used because of disappointed surprise, it should not hurt someone’s feelings, though it brings into the TT an expression coarser than the one used in the SL.

In the next examples, ‘merda’ in the Italian phrases connotes the derogatory quality of the places and the people mentioned, so in the English subtitles, it basically functions as an adjective via Transposition. As previously explained, this entails a shift in word-class.

Stu paese ’e mmerda → [This shit country]

21 Chillu carcere ’e mmerda → [In that shit jail]

Colombiani di merda → [Shit Colombians]

Che fisico ’e mmerda! → [You got a crap body]

However, in some cases, even when ‘shit’ performs the role of an adjective, it may be rendered differently, as in the example ‘Nu chiattone ’e mmerda’ → [Fat shit-ass], where an Equivalence is at work.

Still, things get a little bit more complicated with the following two examples, omm’‘e mmerda and ’isso è n’omm’’e mmerda which, though apparently the same, do not convey the same meaning.

In the English subtitled version, they are basically rendered in the same way: → [You piece of shit] and → [He is a piece of shit], respectively. In this case, however, the two different illocutionary values of the Italian script are erased. As mentioned, the transfer of SWs between two languages depends on the social environment in which the character is uttering the given expression, the situation and/or the reasons that caused this person to express him/herself in that way. In the first case, “omm’‘e mmerda”, the speaker, carried along by his/her emotions, utters such an SW as a general emotional response in order to insult someone else33. Still, even though it is normally considered as rude and impolite, this SW may even be pronounced automatically or ironically as an exclamation according to the context. In the second example, however, the SW performs the function of an adjective where the speaker is speaking in anger and is unmistakably describing the mentioned person as a wicked and deceitful individual. Such Neapolitan expressions like “omm’‘e mmerda” exemplify how words may have very different coefficients of intensity (Snelling 1992: 121), that is, the measure of the force of a lexical item which often stays unmatched in translation. In a translational perspective, “Cultural asymmetry between two linguistic communities is necessarily reflected in the discourses of their members, with the potential opacity and inaccessibility this may involve in the

33 Other variants of this base form found in ScnG(h) are ‘shitface’, ‘shitty’, and ‘shithead’.

22 target culture system” (Franco Aixela 1996: 54). As mentioned before, swearing is deeply culturally rooted to the point that many SWs cannot be explained or translated even back into Italian. Because of this “lexical vacuum” (Katan 2004: 80), mostly existing in terms of a mismatch between the differing Source and Target cultural frames, no one-to-one equivalence for such words that would convey the concept implied by the term could be found. The translators working on ScnG(h) were thus forced to ‘chunk up’, i.e. to move from hyponymy to hyperonymy. ‘Chunking’ (Katan 2004: 147-157) – a term borrowed from computer science, where it refers to changes in size – here stands for a procedure that translators particularly resort to when rendering culturally-bound words and which involves finding a (more or less) culturally-bound, or rather culturally-inclusive, superordinate. It may comprise three different options: ‘chunking down’, i.e. when the generic Source term is translated into a more specific one in the Target language; ‘chunking sideways’, which occurs when the size is not altered and the translator manages to find other examples that are on the same level or belong to the same class; and ‘chunking up’, which, as said above, entails a shift from a narrow to a broader definition. Therefore, when translators decide to cope with culture-specific terms or any other so- called ‘untranslatables’ by ‘chunking up’, they move, or better dilute, the original meaning into a much wider and at the same time vaguer lexical area. This implies depriving the given terms and/or phrases of their cultural nuances, and results in the unavoidable loss of their connotative value and pragmatic emphasis.

Another case in point could be offered by the phrase “È nu sfaccimma”, where the Neapolitan term ‘sfaccimma’ – which, as a noun, indicates a smart, tough and calculating person – is quite improperly subtitled as → [He’s a traitor]. However, as added in the same sentences, he is accused of having been a cheater too, so this explanation could justify the choice of the word ‘traitor’.

Nonetheless, the translations of culture-specific SWs such as ‘sfaccimma’ or ‘omm’‘e mmerda’ result in very different coefficients of intensity and, at the same time, demonstrate how, when chunking up, the strong SL connotations

23 are totally absorbed into, or rather cancelled out by, the more general TL word ‘traitor’ or the quite literal ‘piece of shit’, as in the reported examples.

From the viewpoint of the English subtitles, one of the most frequent morphological variants present in this corpus is the word ‘fuck’, together with its lexical categories ‘fucker’, ‘fucking’, or ‘motherfucker’, such as “schifuso” → [motherfucker].

Such popularity is shared with English films in general since the word ‘fuck’ and its derivatives are the most used SWs in films, “used in curses and exclamations, indicating strong dislike, contempt, or rejection” (Ayto and Simpson 1993: 75-76)34.

‘Fuck’, similarly to ‘shit’, is a content word and has a semantic definition (i.e. the action of having sex), though its denotative meaning is generally the least common. Yet even when it is used at a quite denotative level, it is basically meant as an insult in a derogatory context, such as in “Vaffanculo” → [Go fuck yourself]. However, while ‘fuck’ could possibly be translated into Italian more literally with ‘fottere’, in the corpus under investigation it is very often used to translate the Italian SW ‘cazz(o)’ [lit. dick]. As the examples in the following table show, ‘fuck’ is mainly used with a figurative meaning when the speaker wants to emphasise his utterance in a kind of pejorative way or when it functions as a pejorative, aggressive and informal synonym of the words ‘thing’ or ‘stuff’.

Another clear example in which it is uttered to emphasise the element it goes with can be found in the above-given example [I don’t fucking believe…] where, used as an intensifier, it barely implies a semantic connotation, though it certainly implies a strong negative meaning.

Table 1

Neapolitan Script English Subtitles

34 See also Pujol (2006: 124); Rojo and Valenzuela (2000: 209).

24 Nun me passa manco p’’o cazzo I don’t give a fuck Aró cazzo âmm’’a ì? Where the fuck do we go? Che cazzo stai ricenno? What the fuck are you saying? Che cazzo significa? What the fuck do you mean? Ricca’, nun pagano cchiù ’o They won’t pay a fucking thing anymore cazzo

In many cases, as the examples in Table 1 show, cazz(o) is rendered with (variants of) ‘fuck’, even though, according to their contexts and/or pragmatic functions, many different options have been found, each of them representing as many different strategies, as reported in Table 2.

Table 2

Neapolitan Script English Subtitles Translation Strategy 1) E tu aró cazzo stive? Where the hell were Equivalence you? 2) Nuj rumpimm’’o cazzo We break Equivalence/Deswearing a tutte quante everyone’s balls 3) Ce caca ’o cazzo He will break our Equivalence/Deswearing balls

4) M’aggio scassat’’o I’ve had enough Deswearing cazzo 5) Chi cazzo ce l’ha ritto? Who told him? Omission 6) ’E ppecore senz’’o Sheep with no Literal cane ’e guardia se ne sheepdog go where Translation/Omission vanno p’’e cazze lloro they *** want

The examples reported in Table 2 show a cline from Equivalence down to total Omission through Deswearing. In examples (1) and (2), the Italian SW has been rendered by means of an equivalent considered to be more appropriate in that context, and no sensible variations in meaning between the ST and the TT

25 in (1) can be noticed, though it might possibly be argued that the English version of (2) is already slightly softened. In (3), the Cultural Substitution is definitely a less aggressive term, and the whole utterance is definitely softened and less rude compared to the ST. In (4), although the speaker’s irritation is kept and conveyed, neither SWs nor insults appear, and the general tone of the whole sentence is respectful. In (5) and (6), meanwhile, the ST SWs are totally omitted and, accordingly, the aggressive tune of the ST sentence is downtoned. The Omission carried out in (6) represents a particular case: the audience is made aware that the speaker is uttering an expletive because the whole sentence is literally translated, but the censored SW is signalled with asterisks.

Unlike ‘cazz(o)’, ‘palle’ is instead the SW that is more frequently rendered with a literal translation, i.e. ‘balls’, as some of the following examples show.

Table 3

Neapolitan Script English Subtitles Translation Strategy Vuie site uagliune cu ’e You kids have balls Literal Translation ppalle Vuie tenite ’e ppalle I see you’ve got balls Literal Translation L’aggi’’a sparà int’’e I have to shoot him in the Literal Translation ppalle balls

Likewise, ‘sciem’ (the Neapolitan for ‘scemo’, namely ‘fool’), which is not a proper SW but an insult either way, is generally literally rendered either as ‘dumb’ or ‘idiot’, as shown by some examples in Table 4.

Table 4

Neapolitan Script English Subtitles Translation Strategy Nun aggio maie visto scieme You are as dumb as they Literal Translation cumm’ a te come Ma chist’è scemo! What an idiot Literal Translation Scemo Retard Literal Translation

26 Ma iss’è scemo o è pecché ’o Is this guy an idiot or are Literal Translation fanno fà ’o strunzo? they making out to be an asshole?

The verb ‘fottere’, meanwhile, as mentioned before, using its literal meaning could be translated as ‘fuck’, but it also has its own variant, ‘fottersene’, meaning ‘not to care about something’, and whose equivalent vulgar expression in English is ‘not to give a shit about something’. Here are two literal examples from the corpus:

E nun te ne fossi fottuto ’e me → [Not giving a shit about me]

Me ne fott addò stà → [I don’t give a shit where he is]

Additionally, in the Neapolitan dialect, the same verb can have a further, alternative version, ‘fottere qualcosa a qualcuno’35, meaning ‘to steal something (from someone)’. So, in the original script, the sentence “’A quann’‘e gguardie c’hanno futtuto ’o carico” explains that a particular situation was unfolding since the cops had stolen the drugs that had been shipped to the gangsters. Nonetheless, the English subtitlers resorted to a Paraphrase → [Since the cops screwed our shipment], where the verb ‘to screw’, aside from its denotative meaning as an SW, hints at cheating (or being cheated) in a more general sense rather than specifying the action of being robbed. The English subtitles could also suggest that the drug shipment failed due to the cops’ raid (from a legal viewpoint, one would say ‘thanks to…’).

The SWs ‘strunzo’ (noun) and ‘strunzata’, which in Italian reconnect with the scatological context of ‘merda’, are mainly rendered in the English subtitles as ‘asshole’, as Table 4 above and the following example both demonstrate: “Nun te permettere cchiù ’e fà ’o strunzo â casa mia”→ [Don’t you dare be an asshole in my house]. In this case, the subtitler opts for a denotatively close reference to the original, but increases its comprehensibility by coming up with a TL item

35 A third alternative reflexive version, fottersi (which declines with different reflexive pronouns according to the doer of the action, i.e. io mi fotto, tu ti fotti, etc.), also exists and means ‘to steal something’.

27 which can be recognised as belonging to the cultural system of the ST. Yet exceptions can also clearly be found, such as “Vuo’ fà sempe sti strunzate” → [Cut the bullshit]. The sentence “Arò maronna state jennno” → [Where the hell are you going?] is an example of Adaptation or Cultural Substitution since in an Anglo-Saxon context, i.e. in a presumably non-Catholic scenario, the blasphemy of the word ‘madonna’ would have probably slipped by unnoticed. Nonetheless, in such an English subtitled option (as compared to the original Italian script and/or to a possible Italian back-translation), the oath undergoes ‘mollification’ since naming hell in vain is considered to be far more acceptable than to call down Jesus’ mother.

7. Concluding Remarks

Each “language is embedded in culture […] for the two are inseparable” (Bassnett 2007: 23). This is the great challenge of every translation act. Additionally, every language has its own culture-specific terms, namely “words denoting concepts that another language has not considered worth mentioning or that are absent from the life or consciousness of the other nation” (Leemets 1992: 475). Predictably enough, such words/expressions represent the thorniest issues that translators may face. Most SWs are not only culture-specific terms but the different “reasons for using […] taboo words depend on the conversational goals of the speaker” (Jay 2009: 155). Therefore, due to the complex relationship between culture, context and medium constraints, SWs are definitely among subtitlers’ hardest tasks.

From this viewpoint, in the present study I aimed at scrutinising translation processes in the English subtitles of ScnG(h) in order to analyse the translation strategies at work. In particular, I addressed the question of the (un)translatability of culture-laden elements such as SWs once they are transferred and/or depicted outside the sociocultural cradle from which they originated, focussing on the difficulties involved in translation, from spoken language to written subtitle, from dialect to standard language, as happens in the case of ScnG(h). My analysis did aim at highlighting the translation

28 problems of culture-laden elements, and its focus was on the related issues of cultural inequivalences or losses occurring in the translation process.

According to the results obtained by the present investigation, quite inevitably in the rendering of Neapolitan dialogue into English subtitles, the sociocultural- specific references embedded in the ST tend to remain opaque, because there were no translations available in English for the Neapolitan dialect items. The overall conclusion is that subtitles allow SWs’ denotative and domesticated messages to get across, though their sociopragmatic nuances are often flattened or even disappear.

As is generally acknowledged, cultural concepts and/or items may, more often than not, entail a loss of meaning. “The question is not whether there is translation loss (there always is), but what it consists in and whether it matters” (Dickins et al 2002: 96). From a wider perspective, it can be stated that the effectiveness of a translation as “an act of communication” (Blum-Kulka 1986: 291) increases in direct proportion to the translator’s sound knowledge of lingua-cultural scenarios and his/her awareness of the sociocultural conventions of both Source and Target languages. As far as SW translation strategies are concerned, since culture and context influence the translational discourse in a number of ways, the translation of one specific SW cannot be generalised, nor can patterns of translation be established. Yet, had a corpus-driven approach been chosen for this paper – “a methodology for language studies that has been successfully applied to translation studies in general” (Baños et al. 2013: 483) – some figures could have been offered.

However, corpora in this field of AVT may have their own limitations as a research tool as they make it difficult to define certain SW sociopragmatic factors, since they do not enable the researcher to access the subtitles in their natural multisemiotic form. This is why I opted for a qualitative research method, wherein the bilingual examples have been manually analysed and categorised. An integrated approach would certainly have led me to offer both quantitative and qualitative results. This study might therefore be posited as a springboard for further research in this area.

29

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