On the Translation of
Swearing into Spanish
On the Translation of
Swearing into Spanish
Quentin Tarantino
from Reservoir Dogs
to Inglourious Basterds
By
Betlem Soler Pardo
On the Translation of Swearing into Spanish:
Quentin Tarantino from Reservoir Dogs to Inglourious Basterds
By Betlem Soler Pardo
This book first published 2015
Cambridge Scholars Publishing
Lady Stephenson Library, Newcastle upon Tyne, NE6 2PA, UK
British Library Cataloguing in Publication Data
A catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library
Copyright © 2015 by Betlem Soler Pardo
All rights for this book reserved. No part of this book may be reproduced,
stored in a retrieval system, or transmitted, in any form or by any means,
electronic, mechanical, photocopying, recording or otherwise, without
the prior permission of the copyright owner.
ISBN (10): 1-4438-7267-9
ISBN (13): 978-1-4438-7267-6
To Rafa and Joan
TABLE OF CONTENTS
List of Figures............................................................................................. ix
List of Abbreviations ................................................................................... x
Acknowledgements ................................................................................... xii
Preface ...................................................................................................... xiii
José Santaemilia
Introduction ................................................................................................. 1
Chapter One ................................................................................................. 6
Quentin Tarantino
1.1 The Director’s Life and Cinematographic Background ................... 6
1.2 Film Career .................................................................................... 11
1.3 Violence ......................................................................................... 26
1.4 Homage or Plagiarism? ................................................................. 31
Chapter Two .............................................................................................. 34
Characterisation of Swearwords
2.1 Taboo and Obscenity ..................................................................... 36
2.2 Swearing ........................................................................................ 47
2.3 Political Correctness ...................................................................... 72
2.4 Censorship in the Film Industry ..................................................... 77
Chapter Three ............................................................................................ 98
Analysis and Results
3.1 Methodology and Materials ........................................................... 98
3.2 Hypotheses ..................................................................................... 99
3.3 Analysis of the Insults in Quentin Tarantino: An Initial
Typology ........................................................................................ 99
3.4 Case Study: Sex-Related Insults in Quentin Tarantino and their
Translation into Spanish ............................................................... 159
viii
Table of Contents
Conclusions ............................................................................................. 193
References ............................................................................................... 206
Filmography ............................................................................................ 213
Annexes ................................................................................................... 218
LIST OF FIGURES
Figure 1. Number of insults by category in the seven films
Figure 2. Frequency of insults by category in the seven films
Figure 3. Total number and frequency of sex-related insults in the seven
films
Figure 4. Fuck/fucking as the act of copulation, an emphatic intensifier, a
general expletive, or an interjection
Figure 5. Total number and frequency of excrement/human waste insults
in the seven films
Figure 6. Total number and frequency of body part insults in the seven
films
Figure 7. Total number and frequency of religious insults in the seven
films
Figure 8. Total number and frequency of incest-related insults in the seven
films
Figure 9. Total number of insults related to prostitution in the seven films
Figure 10. Total number of racist insults in the seven films
Figure 11. Total number of cross-categorised insults in the seven films
Figure 12. Frequency of insults related to physical and mental disability in
the seven films
Figure 13. Total number of bodily functions related insults in the seven
films
Figure 14. Total number of animal related insults in the seven films
Figure 15. Total number of homophobic insults in the seven films
Figure 16. Classification of fuck/fucking
Figure 17. Number of times fuck/fucking act as the verb to copulate, as an
intensifier, an expletive or an interjection
Figure 18. Number of times fuck/fucking are translated into Spanish
LIST OF ABBREVIATIONS
ACDVT A
adj.
adv.
BrE
c.f
Ca.
CCELD
CDEU
CODEE
DEL
Dial.
DJ
DP
EDD
Esp.
FR
GMAU
IB
interj.
JB
KB
LDCE
ME
n.
NHDAE
NPDSUE
OD
OE
OED
OHG
OSEDME
PF
Phv
Classical Dictionary of the Vulgar Tongue
Adjective
Adverb
British English
Compare with/Consult
Circa
Collins Cobuild English Language Dictionary
The Cassell Dictionary of English Usage
The Concise Oxford Dictionary of English Etymology
A Dictionary of the English Language
Dialect
Dictionary of Jargon
Death Proof
English Dialect Dictionary
Especially
Four Rooms
Garner’s Modern American Usage
Inglourious Basterds
Interjection
Jackie Brown
Kill Bill
Longman Dictionary of Contemporary English
Middle English
noun
Newbury House Dictionary of American English
The New Partridge Dictionary of Slang and
Unconventional English
Oxford Dictionary
Old English
Oxford English Dictionary
Old High German
Origins: A Short Etymological Dictionary of Modern
English
Pulp Fiction
phrasal verb
On the Translation of Swearing into Spanish
RAE
RD
RHHDAS
SC
SL
ST
TC
TL
TT
UAGGE
usu.
v.
xi
Real Academia de la Lengua Española
Reservoir Dogs
Random House Historical Dictionary of American Slang
Source Culture
Source Language
Source Text
Target Culture
Target Language
Target Text
Usage and Abusage: A Guide to Good English
Usually
verb
ACKNOWLEDGMENTS
It is a pleasure to thank all those who have made this book possible
since it would never have happened without their help and support. First, I
would like to express my gratitude to Dr. José Santaemilia Ruiz, who has
helped extend my knowledge through his own research, comments and
suggestions. Secondly, my biggest thanks go to my parents for
encouraging me to work hard and for giving me the most precious gift,
education. I am deeply grateful to Dr. Duncan Wheeler, Pilar
McGillycuddy and Ray McGillycuddy for their professional support and
their unconditional friendship. I am also indebted to the colleagues who
have given me their support along the way: Agustín Reyes, Luis S.
Villacañas, Gloria Torralba and Eduardo España. I would also like to
extend my sincere appreciation to Mary Savage for helping me with the
final editing stage of the book. And last but by no means least, I want to
express my wholehearted gratitude to Rafa, for his unconditional support,
and because his heartfelt encouragement, understanding and love have
helped me to complete this book. I am truly grateful to you for teaching
me the importance of being positive.
PREFACE
QUENTIN TARANTINO AND THE F-WORD:
TOWARDS THE AUDIOVISUAL
TRANSLATION OF SWEARWORDS
JOSÉ SANTAEMILIA
UNIVERSITAT DE VALÈNCIA
In its age of maturity, translation needs new, engaging, multidisciplinary
topics. This book, entitled On the Translation of Swearing into Spanish:
Quentin Tarantino from Reservoir Dogs to Inglourious Basterds, covers a
vast territory ranging from audio-visual translation (AVT) to cinema, and
from descriptive translation studies to sex-related language.
Under a variety of names—film, screen or multimedia translation—
AVT has grown into one of the most active sub-disciplines of translation
and interpreting studies; in fact, for Díaz-Cintas (2003: 203) “the
translation sub-discipline of this brand new millennium”. And this is so
because audiovisual products are everywhere and are closely linked to
technology—television, cinema and telephony are expanding their
products and diversifying their means of transmission as well as their
technological processes. New areas of study can be added to the traditional
modalities of dubbing and subtitling, such as accessibility and speech
recognition technology. The growing addition of modalities and
disciplines is enriching the field of AVT in terms of technical procedures
and translating strategies, making it highly challenging in terms of its
constraints, popular appeal and ideological implications.
New research areas are also surfacing. For five or six decades, since
the beginnings of the discipline in the 1950s, AVT scholars have mostly
dealt with either linguistic or cultural aspects of AVT texts, or with
technical constraints directly related to images, colour, sounds, movement
and so on. As the number of publications is growing so rapidly, we run the
risk of superfluous, unnecessary repetition of commonalities. We also risk
viewing AVT products as a series of translation units that can only be
xiv
Preface
judged as either correct or incorrect, or that involve losses or gains which
follow a supposed ideal of accuracy or naturalness.
Gambier (2009) mentions a few of the challenges the discipline still
needs to address, among which some notable issues are the study of
censorship and taboo, cultural appropriation, narrative manipulation,
reception and tolerance of dubbing, and all the challenges associated with
digital technology. And, especially, AVT increasingly pursues
multidisciplinarity in its scope and its approaches, thus inviting new
viewpoints from a constellation of disciplines, and forcefully pushing its
own disciplinary boundaries further.
This book ventures into the thorny territory of insults and swearwords
in the films of American director Quentin Tarantino, an enfant terrible of
contemporary cinema, and notorious for his use and abuse of four-letter
words. In his films—particularly in his first films, Reservoir Dogs (1992)
and Pulp Fiction (1994)—he consciously includes swearing as part of his
creative baggage. From that moment onwards, with the exception of
Jackie Brown (1997) and Death Proof (2007), the more Tarantino has
become a mainstream commodity, the more he has avoided bad language,
thus perhaps becoming increasingly palatable for the Hollywood studio
system.
The fact that a filmmaker uses (or abuses) four-letter words much more
at the beginning—or at the end, for that matter—of his cinematographic
career may well seem irrelevant to many readers and scholars alike; for
some, this issue should simply be kept out of academia. They consider
phenomena like taboo, interdictions in language, obscenity or popular
films to be so marginal that they do not warrant academic attention. In
fact, in many an AVT translating project, swearwords are strong
candidates for elimination or euphemisation, in what usually constitutes a
wider sanitisation strategy that considers any challenge to purity
(sexuality, bodily functions, excrements, blasphemies and so on) as too
overwhelming and offensive.
For many others however, (and the author of this book is a good
example), swearwords are an integral part of Tarantino’s artistic project.
Whether we like it or not, whether we like his films or have no time for
them, we must accept that they are part of his artistic-ideological design.
In short, swearwords are as worthy of study as any other linguistic or
discursive phenomenon.
In this book, Betlem Soler has undertaken a brave endeavour. For a
number of years she has patiently seen all of Tarantino’s films and listened
(time and again) to the most fleeting expression of swearing. She has
carefully documented an extensive list of insults (well over one thousand)
On the Translation of Swearing into Spanish
xv
in the original (English) and the dubbed (Spanish) versions. She has
catalogued all these insults and revealed certain recurrent categories that
form the basis for linguistic deprecation—to wit, and in decreasing order,
sex(uality), excrements, body parts, religion, incest, prostitution, racism
and a few others. This patient study has shown that by far the most widely
used category is that of sexual insults (and here the f-word reigns
supreme). Other swearwords, though not representing human sexuality, do
also revolve around it—e.g., body parts, incest, or prostitution.
Using sex-related swearwords seems to be one of Quentin Tarantino’s
favourite ways of expressing a range of emotions—particularly anger,
relief, disappointment or censure—and of helping define his characters on
the screen. Very few of us can indeed imagine Reservoir Dogs or Pulp
Fiction without the abundant, constant use of four-letter words. His later
films (Inglourious Basterds in 2009, and Django Unchained in 2012),
though, cast a serious doubt on this statement, and perhaps invite a
revaluation of how foul or bad language is used in the design of his films.
Jay considers that, “sexuality is one of the most tabooed aspects of
human existence” (2000: 85); without a doubt, reference to other people’s
sex(uality) is one of the most widely used mechanisms to affront, insult or
disqualify. As is evident in Tarantino’s films, body parts, sexual organs,
sexual deviation or illegitimacy are unlimited sources of insult, derision
and moral condemnation.
A number of characters in Tarantino’s earliest films are criminals,
gangsters, drug-dealers, assassins or corrupted policemen. Sociolinguists
like Andersson and Trudgill (1990) or Jay (2000) claim that these groups
are likely to swear more than other social groups, and for these characters
swearing functions simultaneously as in-group vocabulary, rhetorical
device and character identification. Much in the same way as sexual
scenes or sexual terminology as used by Spanish novelists Almudena
Grandes or Lucía Etxebarria have proved instrumental in the construction
of a certain woman-identified, unprejudiced narrative, so Tarantino has
used four-letter words to create an atmosphere and construct his
characters. A passage chosen at random will serve as an apt illustration:
Mr. White. […] That’s the way I look at it. A choice between doin’ ten
years, and takin’ out some stupid motherfucker. What the fuck was Joe
thinking? I came this fucking close to taking his ass out myself (Reservoir
Dogs 1992).
References to (illicit) sexuality are everywhere (motherfucker, fuck,
fucking); in fact, Tarantino shows an impressive record of 658 occurrences
of the f-word in his first seven films, though his references are rarely
xvi
Preface
sexual. They are more to do—following McEnery and Xiao 2004—with
expressive or rhetorical emphasis. The above extract is part of a
conversation between Mr. Pink and Mr. White, talking in the bathroom
after the planned robbery was interrupted by the police, and they realise
they had been set up. Anger, frustration and fear are just some of the
emotions conflated in their use of swearwords.
McEnery and Xiao (2004) found the word fuck to be one of the most
versatile in the English language, as it is variously used as a general
expletive, a personal insult, an emphatic intensifier, an idiom or a
metalinguistic device. Their study of the British National Corpus shows
that it is primarily used as an emphatic intensifier (55.85% of
occurrences)—i.e., its main aim is to add emotional values to the words or
phrases it accompanies. The most striking aspect, however, is that the
denotative sexual meaning of fuck (to copulate) is rarely used in English
(7.16% of cases, as opposed to 92.84% of non-sexual usages). For
Fernández (2006: 225), fuck can “express pain and pleasure, hate and love,
surprise and annoyance, trouble, confusion or difficulty,” and is
considered a taboo word, vulgar, rude and offensive, but nevertheless
heard and used practically anywhere.
Quentin Tarantino, then, makes a very conscious use of the f-word and
its morphological variants. The term is a clear indicator of orality, and
though it is very seldom used to describe sexual intercourse, Tarantino’s
characters (‘The Wolf’, Mr Pink, Mr Brown, Stuntman Mike, or Jules
Winnfield) use it repeatedly to show manliness, toughness, arrogance,
criminality and perhaps an overall culture of aggression.
In her book, Betlem Soler offers a wealth of information on a very
sensitive field of inquiry, involving language use, image and movement,
the film industry, popular imagination, sex-related taboos and swearing.
As the author herself states, “the power of swearwords in Western
societies lies in their prohibition, and since this prohibition still exists, they
are still just as powerful” (this volume, p.113). We are, then, in a vast
(linguistic) terrain driven by desire and subjected to the ups and downs of
morality as well as to societal taboos and individual impulses.
For Tarantino the f-word is a rich rhetorical device for the expression
of a conglomerate of strong emotions. Offence, indecency, base instincts,
inner conflicts, manliness, over-sexualisation, repressed eroticism or moral
interdictions, to name just a few of these traits, are inseparable from
Tarantino’s ultra-violent pulps. I am aware that this may make some
people uncomfortable, which is in fact one of the consequences of the use
of swearwords. However, Betlem Soler ventures into this minefield in a
reflective, academic manner. She has treated sex-related swearwords
On the Translation of Swearing into Spanish
xvii
seriously, knowing them to be one of the surest indicators of identity and
of the representation of a character in film.
I must confess to an unreserved complicity in the topics explored and
the viewpoints expressed in this book. Since the beginning of this
endeavour, a few years ago, when it was an uncertain doctoral project
trying to scale the high walls of academia, we felt the analysis of taboo
words or topics to be a personal, social and academic necessity. We were
not dealing with a merely linguistic or cinematographic exploration but,
above all, a profoundly ideological project. This scenario is, needless to
say, fraught with dangers, censure and incomprehension. It is also, and
perhaps more importantly, teeming with lively ideas, playfulness or
creativity.
The author has taken this task on board with ease and confidence, with
a clear message: swearing exists and—what is more—it is instrumental to
the rhetoric of Tarantino’s films. Soler also analyses how this language is
translated, concluding that the need to adapt or translate Tarantino’s films
for a powerful distribution market obliges dubbing professionals—or
perhaps distribution companies themselves—either to omit or to replicate
what is felt to be an overwhelming presence of four-letter words in
Spanish. If the former tends to produce a sanitised version of the original
Tarantino film, the latter gives way to anglicised expressive routines in
Spanish that are increasingly difficult to avoid in future film releases.
Examples abound. In the first instance, the remark “There’s over four
fuckin’ pages of shit here” (Reservoir Dogs 1992) ends up as “Aquí hay
más de cuatro páginas” [There are more than four pages here], with all the
expletives or swearwords deleted. This is a common dubbing strategy, for
reasons of economy, of oral delivery and of downplaying of sexual
references. In the second case, “Close the fucking door!” (Four Rooms
1995) is rendered as “¡Fuera del puto coche!’, while “Give me this fuckin’
thing” (Reservoir Dogs 1992) becomes “¡Dame esa puta mierda!”, “Have
you lost your fucking mind?” (Reservoir Dogs 1992) turns into “¿Has
perdido la puta cabeza?”1, and “the fuckin’ dog” (Reservoir Dogs 1992) is
dubbed in Spanish as “el bastardo del perro” [the bastard dog]. The
abundance of f-word examples demands swearing routines in Spanish that
may be heavily criticised, or sound unnatural.
We cannot—and should not—ignore the fact that Quentin Tarantino
uses (and abuses) swearwords, particularly the f-word; rather, as an
1
As will be explained later in the book, the Spanish puto/puta, literally prostitute,
is frequently used to translate fuck/fucking as it reflects a very similar usage and
register in the target language. The literal translation of fuck, joder, can often
sound like an unnatural anglicism.
xviii
Preface
exercise in honesty towards both cinema and translation, as well as their
consumers, we must document it and analyse the Spanish dubbed (or
subtitled) versions. The author of this book does so admirably, in an
objective manner, very often suppressing the urgency to correct the
mistranslations, or to provide the omitted expressions or more creative
translations for certain passages. If the f-word exists in the original culture,
it must also exist in the recipient culture. This book aims to accurately
document the original forms of swearing in Tarantino, and their
(un)translated forms in Spanish. The ultimate objective is not a regulatory
one, but rather a practical one: translators and adaptors need finely-tuned
analyses of real films, as they are committed to producing the same effects
as in the original film, and while this certainly has to do with linguistic
accuracy, it is more often to do with aesthetics, culture and ideology.
Sex-related swearing, and its translation, offers a window on social
attitudes and cultural prejudices across languages. Translation (or
adaptation) is a privileged device in creating, shaping, (re)producing and
challenging our taboos and interdictions across languages. Translation
researchers and scholars will certainly welcome this volume, which is
brave, honest and profoundly academic, as it involves a (re)valuation of
marginal phenomena in translation studies as well as a study of the
sensitive, ideological processes present in Quentin Tarantino’s
revolutionary films.
All in all, this is a challenging book that invites careful reading and
reflection. We are fortunate that in dealing with the topic of swearing and
translation, the author has dared to speak its name clearly and loudly.
Bibliography
Andersson, Lars-Gunnar and Peter Trudgill (1990) Bad Language.
London: Penguin Books.
Díaz Cintas, Jorge (2003) “Audiovisual Translation in the Third
Millennium”. In Gunilla Anderman and Margaret Rogers (eds.)
Translation Today: Trends and Perspectives. Clevedon: Multilingual
Matters. 192-204.
Fernández Dobao, Ana María (2006) “Linguistic and cultural aspects of
the translation of swearing: The Spanish version of Pulp Fiction”.
Babel 52(3): 222-242.
Gambier, Yves (2009) “Challenges in research on audiovisual translation”.
In Anthony Pym and Alexander Perekrestenko (eds.) Translation
Research projects 2. Tarragona: Intercultural Studies Group. 17-25.
On the Translation of Swearing into Spanish
xix
Jay, Timothy (2000) Why we curse: A neuro-psycho-social theory of
speech. Philadelphia/Amsterdam: John Benjamins Publishing Co.
McEnery, Tony and Zhonghua Xiao (2004) “Swearing in modern British
English: the case of fuck in the BNC”. Language and Literature 13(3):
235-268.
INTRODUCTION
This book sets out to analyse the insults from the seven films directed
by the North American filmmaker Quentin Tarantino, Reservoir Dogs
[RD], Pulp Fiction [PF], Four Rooms [FR], Jackie Brown [JB], Kill Bill
(vols. I and II) [KB], Death Proof [DP], and Inglourious Basterds [IB],
and how these insults have been translated from English into Spanish. One
of the main reasons why I wanted to build a corpus of this nature was to
document the dubbing of Tarantino’s work and, using concrete examples,
to describe the reality of the translation and provide linguistic material
with which to study the most influential translation modality in Spanish
society, namely, dubbing.
To this end, I built a corpus comprising 1526 insults, arranged in order
of appearance, taken from the seven abovementioned films. The corpus
consists of 1117 tables displaying the insult in the original English and its
translation into Spanish. Given the unfeasibility of including such an
extensive corpus in the print version, all the tables are provided in the CDRom that comes with this book.
The reason for focusing exclusively on the dubbed versions of
Tarantino’s films is because this is by far the most common way films are
translated in Spain. Audiovisual translation—including dubbing—has
attracted the attention of many researchers in recent years since it became
recognised as an academic discipline, due to the fervent determination
among language scholars to establish a theory of translation. Within this
theory of translation, much has been written on reaching equivalence
between languages, and to achieve this the general conclusion is that
studying translation in isolation, without taking into account the sociocultural context, results in an incomplete translation, as we will see
throughout this book.
Before going any further, it is important to point out that my intention
is not to question or criticise the work of those who have translated and
adapted the films analysed here; and although I highlight some particular
examples, what I hope to do in this book is to present the problems that
can arise in translating a complete cinematic production, not call into
question the professionalism of the translators who worked on them.
Cinema is one of the most powerful and influential media today,
together with television. The huge number of films from the USA
2
Introduction
translated into Spanish for screening in Spanish cinemas deserves
particular attention. In an analysis of this nature, therefore, the films of
Tarantino may offer an interesting opportunity from the social perspective
because of the exceptional number of insults they contain.
To perform this study I compared the original version of the films with
the version dubbed into Spanish. My initial intention was to carry out a
comparative analysis of the original scripts in the two languages; however,
I soon realised that some of the offensive language in the scripts had been
stifled in the Spanish version (some insults did not appear at all and others
had been softened). On contacting the scripts’ publishers (Faber and
Faber), they assured me that the texts had not been modified or
manipulated in any way; nonetheless there were obvious differences so I
decided to focus on the dialogues as they were heard on the screen. This
process enabled me to identify, beyond any doubt, the number of insults in
both English and Spanish in all seven of Tarantino’s films.
This book, therefore, is grounded on a corpus of insults classified as
follows: (1) sex-related insults; (2) excrement and human waste insults; (3)
insults related to parts of the body; (4) religious insults; (5) incest-related
insults; (6) insults related to prostitution; (7) racist insults; (8) crosscategorised insults; (9) insults related to physical and mental disability;
(10) insults related to bodily functions; (11) animal-related insults; and
(12) homophobic insults (Jay, 1992). My analysis revealed the sex-related
insults category to be the largest group, which led me to centre the study
on this category, with particular attention to one specific word that
appeared most frequently in the seven films: fuck and its morphological
variants. The language in Tarantino’s films has provided a peculiar and
interesting field of study since the first minutes of his debut film were
aired in 1992, Reservoir Dogs, due to his relentless use of obscene
vocabulary. The opening lines in this film, spoken by Mr Pink and Mr
Blue, contain the (offensive) words: (1) dick and dicks; (2) fucked over,
and (3) bullshit; in other words, in under two minutes, the director has
included, (1) words related to the male pudenda; (2) a sex-related verb;
and (3) an animal waste insult. The plethora of material to explore in depth
in these dialogues prompted me to conduct research into swearing and
swearwords, taking Tarantino’s work as a reference.
The three instances presented above are just a small taste of
Tarantino’s output: I recorded 15261 insults in the seven films analysed
[Reservoir Dogs, Pulp Fiction, Four Rooms, Jackie Brown, Kill Bill,
1
Note that there are 1526 insults all together, but that there are 1117 examples in
the tables in the appendix since some insults appear more than once.
On the Translation of Swearing into Spanish
3
Death Proof, and Inglourious Basterds], which I identified, classified and
analysed in the preparation for this book. The magnitude of this figure is
evidence of Tarantino’s constant use of swearwords, regardless of what his
audiences might think, and whether or not they might sometimes prefer
not to hear such a steady stream of foul language. Notwithstanding, his
popularity has been achieved precisely because he refuses to allow
distribution companies to alter his dialogues in any way, or modify the
violence of his scenes. This is, therefore, one of the reasons why I believe
Tarantino’s films could be of interest to the reader.
The book is divided into three chapters: Quentin Tarantino (Chapter
1); Characterisation of Swearwords (Chapter 2); and Analysis and Results
(Chapter 3).
A book based on the work of Tarantino clearly demands some
background on the director’s personal and professional experiences.
Chapter 1, Quentin Tarantino, gives an overview of the filmmaker’s life
and introduces Tarantino in his various roles as director, executive
producer, actor and scriptwriter. An exploration of certain aspects of his
personal life is a useful exercise since I consider that his heavy use of
swearing on screen may be due to experiences in his childhood and
adolescence. This chapter also examines the concepts and style that define
his films: the genres of exploitation/blaxploitation, the (spaghetti) western,
hard-boiled and film noir that have had such a major influence in his work.
This first chapter therefore offers a summary of Tarantino’s film career,
both the films he has directed (Reservoir Dogs, Pulp Fiction, Four Rooms
Jackie Brown, Kill Bill vols. I and II, Death Proof and Inglourious
Basterds) and, although not in such great depth, others for which he wrote
the script (True Romance, Natural Born Killers, From Dusk Till Dawn and
Sin City).
The following section examines areas such as violence in his work and
the controversial question of the authenticity of his films. Tarantino, raised
under the influence of a series of violent films, soaked up their brutality in
his childhood and adolescence and has attempted to transfer them to his
own oeuvre. As a result many of the characters in his films have a
propensity to swear, since Tarantino has assigned them certain common
characteristics that may determine their excessive use of obscene
language. This style has provoked negative comments from film critics
who consider his work to be over-influenced by extreme levels of
violence.
Chapter 2, Characterisation of Swearwords, explores issues such as
taboos and obscene language in relation to insults in particular. The aim of
this section is to identify and study subjects that are considered taboo: (1)
4
Introduction
sex; (2) death; (3) bodily functions and parts of the body; (4) emotions; (5)
racism; and (6) religion.
This brief introduction to taboos and obscenity is followed by a look at
the approaches various scholars have taken in their analyses of insults; I
explore in turn the work of Ashley Montagu, Timothy Jay, Edwin
Battistella, Tony McEnery, and Keith Allan and Kate Burridge. In this
chapter I deal with the reasons—social, linguistic or psychological—why
we use bad language, and our attempts to avoid its usage. The third section
introduces the topic of political correctness and examines euphemisms and
dysphemisms. I considered it important to mention politically correct
language in this chapter since the cinema industry, as mass entertainment,
follows, and is therefore subject to, the norms of political correctness. This
section is illustrated with a discussion on euphemisms and dysphemisms.
The final section of this chapter covers the culture of the USA and its
(self)censorship, and Spanish culture and its (self)censorship, and the
implications of using insults in the mass media; the section concludes with
a discussion on censorship in Tarantino’s films, some of which—
Reservoir Dogs, Pulp Fiction and Natural Born Killers for example—
were refused licences to appear on video for long periods in the United
Kingdom, although they were all eventually released after a few years.
Swearwords are used to hurt the feelings of the person to whom they
are addressed, to express certain emotions, and to gain acceptance in a
particular group. However it goes without saying that although insults and
bad language are subject to taboos and censorship, on certain occasions
they are also used as terms of endearment between friends and family.
In Chapter 3 I turn to the methodology used in the research and the
hypotheses that emerged from the first part of the study, together with the
analysis of the results. One of the hypotheses raised in the study is that
insults tend to be eliminated when they are dubbed into Spanish.
In section 3.3, Analysis of the Insults in Quentin Tarantino: An Initial
Typology, I investigate the insults related to the following categories: (1)
sex; (2) excrement and human waste; (3) body parts; (4) religion; (5)
incest; (6) prostitution; (7) racism; (8) cross-categorised insults; (9)
physical and mental disability; (10) bodily functions; (11) animals; and
(12) homophobia. In section 3.4, Case Study: Sex-Related Insults in
Quentin Tarantino and their Translation into Spanish, I discuss the most
frequently used insult in the corpus, fuck/fucking, and examine the various
ways it is translated into Spanish. The reason for this inquiry was to
determine whether the number of insults was lower in the translated
version. This analysis might also provide significant insights into Spanish
On the Translation of Swearing into Spanish
5
culture and further our understanding of Spanish society, all of which is
essential to any understanding of how a language works.
To conclude this introduction, it is important to highlight that the
translation of an audiovisual text presents more linguistic transfer
difficulties than a literary text, not only because of the linguistic problems
that can arise, but also due to non-linguistic constraints. Likewise, it must
be stressed that analysis of obscene or foul language is just as important as
any other academic or cultural aspect, since it furthers our understanding
of the social environment in which it has developed and evolved.
CHAPTER ONE
QUENTIN TARANTINO
In the following section, I describe aspects of Tarantino’s life and the
cinematographic trends and genres on which he has based his work, such
as exploitation, blaxploitation, western, spaghetti-western, hard-boiled and
film noir. I refer to his film career and filmography, focusing on the seven
films on which my research is based [Reservoir Dogs, Pulp Fiction, Four
Rooms, Jackie Brown, Kill Bill vols. I and II, Death Proof and Inglourious
Basterds], and briefly mention four of the most highly acclaimed films that
he worked on in the capacity of scriptwriter (True Romance, Natural Born
Killers), co-scriptwriter and actor (From Dusk Till Dawn) or guest director
(Sin City). I explore aspects of his work as an independent filmmaker, cult
movie director, and global icon, and also highlight the distinction between
commercial director and cult movie filmmaker. This section ends by
questioning the violence in his films, and the issue of plagiarism that has
pursued him throughout his career.
I introduce the reader to Tarantino with a brief biography of his life. I
deemed it appropriate to look at some aspects of his private life because I
believe the origins of his use of swearing on screen can be traced back to
his childhood and adolescence, as I shall highlight in the next section.
1.1 The Director’s Life and Cinematographic Background
Quentin Jerome Tarantino was born in Knoxville, Tennessee (USA) on
the 27th March, 1963. He was named after a character in the American
television western drama Gunsmoke directed by Norman MacDonnell
whose star, Quint Asper, was one of his mother’s favourite actors. Quentin
was brought up in South Bay, Los Angeles, where he lived for nearly
twenty years in a mixed black and white neighbourhood. Here, he was
exposed to a variety of cinema genres and popular culture since
exploitation, blaxploitation, or (spaghetti) western films were among the
most popular forms of entertainment with adolescent cinema-goers at that
time. Whether coincidence or otherwise, these are some of the genres that
Tarantino draws on in his films, which supports the hypothesis that the
Quentin Tarantino
7
filmmaker’s early life had a strong influence on his cinematographic
career.
He inherited his passion for cinema from his mother, Connie McHugh
(later Tarantino), a half Cherokee, half Irish young single mother, who
used to take him to the cinema to watch adult films when he was just a
young boy. His mother’s life had a huge influence on the young Tarantino;
at the age of 16 she married a musician called Tony Tarantino, and soon
became pregnant with her only child, Quentin, although the couple
separated not long after. A few years later, Connie married another
musician, Curt Zastoupil, and moved to Los Angeles where Tarantino
would spend his teens under the paternal figure of his step-father. He
found it difficult to concentrate in class and also had dyslexia; as a result
Quentin left school at the age of 17 to become a self-taught student who
combined watching films and TV programmes with reading comics. Soon
after leaving school, he took up performance classes in Toluca Lake and
started to write scripts (Clarkson, 1996).
Living with a teenage working mother meant that the young Quentin’s
childhood and adolescence was far from normal. His mother was absent
most of the time due to long shifts at the hospital, where she worked as a
nurse. Tarantino was looked after by a friend of his mother’s, another
teenager called Jackie, who made no attempt to control what films or TV
programmes he was watching. In addition, his mother used to take him to
see a wide range of films in the cinema, regardless of the age certificate.
At an early age, he was therefore used to seeing all types of verbal and
physical abuse, which, it seems, he reproduces in his own work: films
based on memories from his early years. For instance, the central plots of
many exploitation B-movies used eroticism and violence as a criticism of
society, and their main characters were gangsters, policemen, and femmes
fatales. Some popular variations of exploitation films were the “girl-inprison” films or those with a prostitute in the leading role. Because their
main themes revolved around crime and drugs, exploitation films typically
used objectionable language, a factor that appeals to Tarantino, as seen in
his tendency to include scandalous levels of swearing and cursing in his
films. Out of exploitation movies came blaxploitation inspired by the
Black Power movement (Comas, 2005), which I now explore.
Blaxploitation films reverse traditional black and white roles: the black
characters are the “good guys” and the whites are the “bad guys”. Few
blaxploitation movies arrived to Spain, perhaps because the Spanish
audience did not identify with the black actors in starring roles (Comas,
2005). However, because Tarantino had both white and black friends, it
was a natural step for him to explore blaxploitation since he could fully
8
Chapter One
identify with the plot. Belton (1994) refers to this genre as “inexpensively
made exploitation films pitched primarily to middle-and lower-class urban
blacks” (1994: 292). He also describes the concept as follows:
Though blaxploitation films were often merely the reworking and recasting
of traditionally white stories, plot situations, and character types for black
audiences with black actors, many of them nonetheless addressed the
concerns of the black community in ways which were unprecedented on
the American screen (Belton, 1994: 292).
This film genre was controversial, and members of the black
community and the National Association for the Advancement of Colored
People (NAACP) protested against the roles black people were given, such
as outlaws, criminals, pimps or drug dealers (Belton, 1994: 294). These
roles necessarily called for the use of obscene language. Corral (2005)
notes that the adolescent Tarantino’s obsession with exploitation and
blaxploitation films, B-movies or low budget films subsequently exerted a
strong influence on his own filmmaking which involved elements of crime
and much dark humour. While working in a video club, Video Archives,
he would recommend customers the films that had most influenced him:
blaxploitation films, B-movies, spaghetti-westerns, Italian horror or the
Samurai and martial arts films, genres that he would later examine in his
own films.
Another genre Tarantino explores, the western, had connections with
nature; as Belton (1994: 217) points out: “in these films the chief conflict
lies between culture and nature” and focuses on “the hero’s struggle for
survival in a natural landscape”1. Belton (1994: 206) also defines some of
the main characteristics of the western genre as, (1) country and western
music; (2) jeans; (3) fast food; (4) Marlboro cigarettes; (5) people who
abandon civilisation for a wild life in a caravan; and (6) an iconic car like
a Mustang or a Thunderbird2. Contact with nature or the wilderness, far
away from civilisation and social and moral conventions, meant that taboo
words were used indiscriminately to recreate the atmosphere. This idea
caught Tarantino’s attention and he later brought it to the screen in Kill
Bill (vols. I and II), and Death Proof.
A close relation of the western is the spaghetti-western, a sub-genre
also known as the italo-western or eurowestern, which consists of lowbudget films produced by European companies. These films typically
1
This is evident in Tarantino’s fifth film, Kill Bill vol.II, when Uma Thurman tries
to escape from the wilderness of the desert.
2
Such as ‘the Pussy Wagon’ in Kill Bill, presented to ridicule its owner.
Quentin Tarantino
9
involve a dirty aesthetic and tough, hard amoral characters. Italo-westerns
were sometimes collaborations with Spanish companies. Examples of
spaghetti-westerns are the Sergio Leone films shot in Andalusia and
starring a young Clint Eastwood: A Fistful of Dollars (1964); For a Few
Dollars More (1965); The Good, the Bad and the Ugly (1966) (Comas,
2005). Tarantino seems to be influenced by Italian gore and other Italian
directors such as George Romero, John Carpenter or Tobe Hooper. The
figure of Jean-Luc Godard, a pioneer of the French nouvelle vague, also
played an important role in Tarantino’s film career, to the point that the
name of his production company, A Band a Part, was borrowed from
Godard’s 1964 film Bande à part. In such films, swearing had a constant
presence as it helped to determine the masculinity of their characters and
define the figure of the macho.
Another significant genre, hard-boiled, originated in the 1930s and was
inspired by American hard-boiled novels or crime novels (pulps) by
authors such as Dashiell Hammett, James M. Cain, Horace McCoy or
Raymond Chandler, all later taken to the screen. According to Belton
(1994), these films “feature a proletarian tough guy who lives on the fringe
of the criminal world” (Belton, 1994: 194). The sleuths in this genre
contrasted sharply with the traditional detective; they are not heroes but
anti-heroes. Typical of this genre is the way realism takes over from
fiction, which gave rise to great expectations. In the words of Belton
(1994), hard-boiled films
introduce a new tradition of realism to the genre of detective fiction. This
‘realism’ is characterized by a revolutionary shift in both the class and the
technique of the detective, the milieu in which the detective works, and the
language which he or she speaks (Belton, 1994: 194).
As a film spectator, Tarantino was therefore greatly influenced by
crime magazines (pulps), Japanese TV series, spaghetti-westerns and the
world of drugs from his youth in Los Angeles, which he combined with
new ideas of his own. Violence in the streets and obscene language were
commonplace in Los Angeles, and as he tried to reproduce scenes from the
films he had watched in cinemas, he blended them with situations he
invented:
I just grew up watching a lot of movies. I’m attracted to this genre
[samurai movies, Yakuza movies, spaghetti Westerns] and that genre, this
type of story, and that type of story. As I watch movies I make some
version of it in my head that isn’t quite what I’m seeing - taking the things
I like and mixing them with stuff I’ve never seen before (Lathan, 2003).
10
Chapter One
Examples of this are found in Jackie Brown, where the main character,
Jackie, and her counterpart, the bondsman Max, live on the margins of
society. The two roles in the film are a criminal and a (retired) detective.
The concept of film noir also holds an interest for Tarantino as it offers
ample scope for violence, shootings, crime, etc., with their inevitable
range of colourful vocabulary. He is influenced by crime films based on
novels3, neo-noir and westerns: the eternal dichotomy of good and evil.
Although noir comes from the French for black, the phenomenon
originated in Hollywood. The vast majority of directors who experimented
with film noir were American born or brought up in America, and
included Billy Wilder, Fritz Lang, Otto Preminger, Edgar G. Ulmer (all
born outside the US), and Orson Welles, John Huston, Nicholas Ray,
Samuel Fuller, Joseph H. Lewis and Anthony Mann. Film noir began to
appear in 1944 and in general its films were adaptations of novels by
Raymond Chandler, James M. Cain, Horace McCoy, among others.
According to Belton (1994: 184), the film noir period only ran from the
1940s to the early 1950s, and was not initially classified as a genre; Belton
(1994: 192) explains that, “film noir has been transformed from an
aesthetic movement into a genre”.
The features of film noir are summarised by Raymond Burde and
Etienne Chaumeton in their Panorama du film noir américain (1993) as
follows: (1) there is always a crime; (2) it is filmed from the perspective of
the criminals not the police; (3) the point of view is turned around—
policemen are corrupt; (4) friendship or loyalty is not to be relied upon; (5)
the femme fatale: a woman is responsible for the terrible fate of a good
man; (6) savage violence; and finally (7) middle class killers: WASPs
(White Anglo-Saxon Protestants). Belton (1994: 188) adds to this list (8)
loneliness and isolation of the individual; (9) absurdity and pointless
existence; and (10) paranoia as a result of the previous factors. The role of
the femme fatale in a film noir is especially noteworthy; she uses sex to
get what she wants, she is intelligent, attractive, narcissistic and
promiscuous. In the case of Jackie Brown, Pulp Fiction, Kill Bill, Death
Proof or Inglourious Basterds, Belton’s definition is fitting: “women in
film noir tend to be characterised as femmes fatales, intent on castrating or
otherwise destroying the male hero” (Belton, 1994: 199). This role is
played by Uma Thurman in Pulp Fiction and Kill Bill; Pam Grier in Jackie
Brown; Jordan Ladd, Vanessa Ferlito or Zoë Bell, for example, in Death
Proof; and Diane Krüger in Inglourious Basterds. This implies that:
3
This emerged out of a literary genre which appeared at the end of the 19th
century in Europe (e.g., Sherlock Homes by Sir Arthur Conan Doyle) (Comas,
2005).