earticle

영어

Among the thousands of languages that exist in the world, it isunlikely that there is any language that does not contain profane expressions. Since profane expressions reflect the actual lives of people, they have remained an important component of language and have not disappeared even as social conditions have changed over the eras. Nonetheless, profanity has tended to be avoided for a long period in the field of language studies because such expressions are not considered beautiful language. The present study focuses on the short story “A Handbook to Divorce” written by the contemporary Chinese author Su Tong in 1991 to explore strategies for appropriately translating profanity that appears in works of Chinese literature. Since profane expressions do not have specifically established concepts of significance, they constitute cultural elements with meanings that are difficult to explain specifically in the absence of contextual information. For this reason, in order to comprehend the in-depth meaning of Chinese profane expressions that are a part of high context culture, it is essential to rely on contextual understanding. Moreover, it must not be overlooked that even the same profane expression that appears within the same work may have different meanings and intensities depending on the situation and the characters involved. Therefore, when translating profane expressions, translators must avoid eliminating such expressions or translating them according to the denotative meaning without regard for the nuances of character and context that the author seeks to express. Furthermore, the translator should not limit the range of expressions to only those expressions that the translator is accustomed to using. It is necessary to apply a contextual translation strategy that analyzes the context of both the source text and the target text in order to create translations of profanity that corresponds to the actual situation and the characters to achieve an equivalency of effect rather than an effect of meaning.