Study on Chinese Subtitling of English Swearwords: the Case of Django Unchained

Swearwords are used in movies as an important means to portrait the characters. However, the Chinese subtitling of English swearwords has been little studied. Subtitling of swearwords in an audiovisual text has always been influenced by various factors which depend on the period of time, political circumstances, religion, culture, the translator's ideology and limited time and space. Subtitling of swearwords is a task not easy to achieve since the translator faces the predicament of trying to please the entire audience and distributors. Based on the case of Django Unchained, this paper aims to study Chinese subtitling of English swearwords in a descriptive approach.