Interpreting Swearwords in Police Interviews and Perceived Offensiveness of Insults in the UK and Spain

Abstract

Despite how damaging the consequences of an inadequate translation of swearwords might be, little attention has been paid to insults, in both academic research and interpreting training. The mistranslation of an insult can affect how the police officer perceives the severity of the punishable offence and makes a judgment about what kind of action is appropriate. This study includes two experiments. First, an interpreting experiment was carried out with English–Spanish interpreting students (N = 36), including the translation of 30 insults in three different contexts. The second task aimed to find how each of the insults was comparable across both languages, according to native speakers’ perceptions. We elicited native speakers’ ratings for offensiveness of each of these lexical items (British N = 204 and Spanish N = 178). The results show variation in the degree of offensiveness by Spanish and British English speakers. We argue that learning insults needs to become part of interpreting training in legal contexts. This study aims to contribute to this interdisciplinary area, with one of the practical goals being the application of our results in professional training.