BAD WORDS IN THE GOOD PLACE: ANALYZING THE EUPHEMISTIC FUNCTION OF WORDPLAYS IN SUBTITLING AND DUBBING – A CASE OF ENGLISH AND PORTUGUESE LANGUAGE PAIR

Abstract

In this paper, we examine the translation of euphemistic wordplays used in The Good Place, an American fantasy comedy television series. Twenty-eight wordplays, resulting from censored curse words, were collected from the Netflix platform, and compared with their counterparts in Brazilian Portuguese, to verify whether the adopted linguistic mechanisms preserved their pragmatic effect, and whether they were consistently transferred into the target language in the dubbed and subtitled versions of the series. Our study basically drew on the ideas by Delabastita (1996); Gotlieb (1997); Tagnin (2005); Diaz Cintas (2010); Dias Cintas & Orero (2010); Remael (2010); Darta (2020), and Brezolin (2020a). Our results demonstrate that, out of the 28 occurrences, 25 wordplays in the dubbed version and 10 in the subtitled version were successfully transferred into the target language, that is, they were adapted to the local setting, and then, preserved their humorous effect; and 3 in the dubbed version and 18 in the subtitled version were replaced by non-wordplays, or omitted. The successful results in the target language were not so consistent as the original excerpts in terms of lexical choices, and the dubbed version demonstrated to be more consistent once most of the wordplays were translated, and more suitable lexical items were selected to generate them.