Profanity in English-Ukrainian translation: creativity vs censorship

Abstract

This article rethinks the rendering of profanity from a cultural translation perspective. Profanity is broadly recognised as one of translation problems but its study has been mostly concentrated on language issues, namely stylistic ones. When viewed in terms of linguistic analysis, profanity is described as low words including argot, slang, jargon, etc. In terms of translation studies these language units are characterized as limited in usage non-normative ones, marked both culturally and emotively and coming in three varieties: abusive, socially and territory conditioned lexis. This study concentrates on the Ukrainian translation of J. D. Salinger’s novel The Catcher in the Rye, which naturally limits profanity to the first two varieties. The methodological underpinning of the research brings into the fore the interdependence and interconnections between translator’s creativity and his ideological stance restricted by censorship. The first edition of the Ukrainian translation by O. Logvynenko was published back in 1984 and it was a fully valued one, judging from a number of republications and Ukrainian readers’ high response.

The translator’s mastery however needs consideration in the social-political context of his activity. The censorship limitations in the Soviet Union of the early 1980-s, though not as strict as they used to be earlier, were still there and included among others the requirement to regard the Russian translation made several decades before as the example to follow. In his obvious willingness to render profanity as an important distinctive feature of the hero’s psychological state, O. Logvynenko had to take it into account. He rendered profanity of the source text in about a half of all the fragments of the target text employing full or partial (functional) equivalents which allowed to preserve emotive connotations. In other cases that constitute a little more than a half of all under study, he sometimes resorted to compensation which had the same effect. Still, in a number of target text fragments emotive connotations are lost as profanity is substituted with normative language units or omitted. A glance into the nature of such cases brings us to the conclusion that they were caused not by the lack of translation decisions but by ideological considerations, namely censorship constraints.