SLANG IN TRANSLATION A Case Study of the Swedish Subtitles in the Film Clueless.

Abstract

This study investigates how English slang is translated in the Swedish subtitles in the film Clueless (1995) looking at how the meaning and message can be transferred. Subtitles are interesting to look at since they follow strict conventions, limiting the translator from being verbose or adding extra information. For this reason, the material was chosen because of the difficulty of translating slang across linguistic and cultural borders and it is thus of interest to see how the Swedish subtitles render the use of slang in a film where the narrative and characterisation rests on it. The study is a qualitative case study using Gottlieb’s (1992) translation strategies for classification of the subtitles. Furthermore, the subtitles were analysed to identify to what capacity the different strategies were able to transfer slang. The findings showed similarity with previous studies, conducted between different language pairs, suggesting that strategies allowing neutralisation of slang are the most recurrent. However, the total use of slang was relatively high, and the subtitles showed instances of the translator making the unconventional choice of directly translating English slang into Swedish.