“What the hell’s going on?” A diachronic perspective on intensifying expletives in original and dubbed film dialogue

Film dialogue is characterised by strong emotionality expressed through
many linguistic traits, not least swearing and taboo language. Using the
Pavia Corpus of Film Dialogue (PCFD), this short-term diachronic study
explores how a set of English intensifying expletives, namely bloody,
fucking, (god)damn, the fuck and the hell, are deployed in Anglophone
films and how they are dubbed into Italian in a timespan of more than
two decades (1995-2017). Results show a significant growth in the frequency
of intensifying expletives in English film dialogue over time confirming
the increase in swearing in Anglophone telecinematic products (Azzaro
2018). The opposite direction is taken by dubbing, where omission and
mitigation of expletives have increased considerably in the last decade,
leading to a reduction of the pragmatic force of the original texts. The
wide repertoire of translational routines employed in dubbing indicates
an orientation to both source language expressions (calques) and target
language patterns. These findings lead us to reflect on censorship, source
text interference, target text adaptation, hybridisation and the increase of
phraseological variability over time, which testifies to the dynamicity of
translational routines in dubbing and to the distinctiveness of audiovisual
discourse in itself.