Cultural differences in swearing: translation of Polish curse words into English and Chinese based on examples from the video game The Witcher 3: Wild Hunt

Abstract

This study analyses cultural differences in Polish, English, and Chinese swearing and their impact on the translation of vulgarisms. The corpus comprises 102 swear words from The Witcher 3: Wild Hunt (CD Projekt Red 2015): Polish and English dubbing and Chinese subtitles. The items were classified using five parameters, enabling the identification of correlations between swear word properties and translation strategies.