AUSIT Webinar | 20250409 Raging against the machine: Translating swearwords – and everything else – in the age of AI

Swearing varies enormously from language to language, presenting unique challenges for translators. Taboo words that express extreme emotions in one language may indicate nothing more than mild impatience in another. Additionally, exotic combinations of scatology and theology may have a medieval tone in one language while being an essential part of 21st-century street slang in another. This webinar will address the specific challenges involved in translating swearwords, highlighting the need to consider issues such as the mismatch of literal and pragmatic meaning, cultural differences between source and target languages, questions of register, tone, and voice, as well as the continuum between translation and localisation. Through various examples drawn from fiction and theatre translation, the discussion will illustrate how effective translation solutions require a deep understanding of both the source and target contexts, extending beyond the words on the page. The focus will be on pragmatics, the broader text, cultural context, and how specific choices impact the overall effect of the finished translation and its reception by readers. Despite the launch of ChatGPT in 2023 and the concern of human translators being replaced by machines, this webinar will highlight that aspects such as pragmatic meaning, cultural context, tone, and register remain beyond the reach of even the most sophisticated machine translation solutions. Our Presenter - Tim Gutteridge is a creative translator from Spanish into English. His work includes crime fiction, non-fiction and theatre. He has translated scripts and synopses for TV dramas and docudramas, and is regularly commissioned to translate fiction and non-fiction samples and publicity material by Spanish publishers and literary agencies. His other regular clients include a major pharmaceutical company for whom he translates corporate communications material, and an NGO which produces educational material about tuna conservation in both text and audiovisual formats.