Ávila-Cabrera, José Javier. The challenge of subtitling offensive and taboo language into Spanish: a theoretical and practical guide

Abstract

Audiovisual translation (AVT) is a well-established field of study in academia and is ripe with research opportunities for scholars (Pérez-González 2020; García-Escribano 2025). A dynamic and multifaceted area of study within AVT is the translation of taboo and offensive language, which has been of rising interest in the last two decades. The vitality and richness of this research area are evident in a burgeoning body of research on the topic (see Valdeón 2024). In this context, the book The Challenge of Subtitling Offensive and Taboo Language into Spanish: A Theoretical and Practical Guide makes a valuable contribution to current scholarship and offers a reliable reference for subtitling training and research. The present literature on the translation of taboo and offensive language is grounded on two main strands of research: how AVT translators handle taboo and offensive language (i.e., translation strategies) and how the socio-cultural environment of the receiving culture governs translators’ renderings. Given that the translation of taboo and offensive items is highly culture-dependent, it has been studied in various European (Guillot 2023; Ávila-Cabrera 2016; Xavier 2022), Asian (Khoshsaligheh, Ameri, and Mehdizadkhani 2018; Al-Zgoul and Al-Salman 2022; Jin and Ye 2023) and Latin American countries (Cândido Moura and Iost Vinhas 2023). Recent studies have ignited a burst of new investigations in the field by incorporating audience and reception studies (Pavesi and Zamora 2022; Chen 2022; Moura 2024), cross-cultural studies (Guillot 2023) and English-language AVT (Barrera-Rioja 2023), among other things.