Strategies for Sexual-Language Translation in British Television Series: Sex Education
Keywords:
Translation strategies, Sexual language, Sex Education, Non-equivalence at word level, Cultural substitutionAbstract
The research examined translation strategies from English to Thai of sexual language in British TV series’ subtitles: Sex Education (2019). The data was collected from all 8 episodes of Netflix’s Sex Education’s season 1. It focuses primarily on the exploration of the strategies used to deal with non- equivalent translation at the word level. The research recognized translation strategies from English into Thai based on Mona Baker’s framework (Baker, 2018) and employed qualitative methods to filter and analyse the data. The results revealed that the most frequently used strategy was the translation by using loan words (36.20%), followed by translation by a more neutral/less expressive word (27.62%), translation by cultural substitution (19.04%), translation by paraphrase using a related word (6.66%), translation by paraphrase using unrelated words (4.76%), translation by omission (2.86%) and translation by a more general word (2.86%), respectively. However, translation by illustration was not found in this research. The discussions also present insights regarding the use of sexual language in different contexts and suggestions on how and when to use it. The research provides a major contribution to translators who are interested in sex-related language translation, and it is also beneficial for Thai people and others enjoying watching the Sex Education series and need to rely on the subtitles translated from English into Thai.
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