Dirty Words Theories of Speech

17 Obscene words are considered the most offensive and are rarely used in public media. The examples are fuck, motherfucker, cocksucker, cunt, or tits that have gained universal restriction. The obscene word “fuck” although restricted in media is one of the most frequently recorded dirty words in public, especially in the form of an expletive. The category of vulgarity in Jay’s view is rather general. In his opinion, v ulgarity means the language of the common person, “the person in the street”, or the unsophisticated, unsocialized, or under-educated so that it do not necessarily have to be obscene or taboo but just reflect the crudeness of street language. Words such as snot, slut, crap, kiss my ass, puke are not really offensive but maybe considered impolite or inappropriate. Another category proposed by Jay is slang. According Jay 1992, p. 6, slang is a vocabulary that is developed in certain sub-groups teenagers, musicians, soldiers, drug users, or athletes for ease of communication. Swan 1996, p. 22 defines slang as a word, expressions or special use of language found mainly in very informal speech, especially in the usage of particular groups of people. Thus, slang code serves to identify members of the group, while misuse or ignorance of it identifies non-members, which may be especially important in illegal transactions Jay, idem. Akmajian, Demers, Farmer, and Harnish 2010, p. 303 state that slang is sometimes referred to as vernacular and some forms of slang fall under the term colloquialism, referring to informal conversational styles of language. However, as noted by Eble 1996, p. 19 slang must be distinguished from regionalism or 18 dialect words, jargon, profanity and obscenity, colloquialism, and cant or argot although slang shares some characteristics with each of these and can overlap them. Akmaijan et al idem state that there are some salient features of slang which are 1 being part of casual, informal style of language use so that it has traditionally carried a negative connotation and it is often perceived as a “low” or “vulgar” form of language, 2 being rapidly changing—slang terms enter a language rapidly but after a few years or even months they fall out of fashion, 3 being associated with a particular social group so that one can speak teenage slang, prison slang, and so on. Dumas and Lighter 1978, p. 14-16 propose four identifying criteria for slang which are 1 the presence of slang will markedly lower the dignity of formal or serious speech or writing, 2 the use of slang implies the user’s special familiarity either with the referent or with that less statusful or less responsible class of people who have such special familiarity and use the term, 3 being a tabooed term in ordinary discourse with persons of higher social status or greater responsibility, 4 being used in place of the well-known conventional synonym, especially in order a to protect the user from the discomfort caused by the conventional item or b to protect the user from the discomfort or annoyance of further elaboration. Although slang is not really a category of dirty words, the two often go hand in hand. The reason is they both are features of substandard language and people are like to use them in the same context as explained above. Fromkin, Rodman, Hyams 2003, p. 473 state that besides introducing new words by recombining old words into new meanings, slang also introduces 19 entirely new words such as barf, flub, and pooped. Jay 1992, p. 7 notes that sometimes slang terms become popular and are used in standard language so that sub-group members have to invent a new code. However, other terms are never integrated into standard dialects due to their offensiveness to public. The examples of slang terms are pimp, cherry, john. The next category is epithet. Jay 1992, p. 7 notes that epithets are brief but forceful bursts of emotional language. The term epithet itself can be misleading since in syntax the term epithet is used for adjective or phrases describing a characteristics of a person or thing. Other theorists usually call it as swearing. Ljung 2011, p. 4 proposes criteria for what constitute swearing or in Jay’s term epithet as the following: 1. Swearing is the use of utterances containing taboo words 2. The taboo words are used with non-literal meaning 3. Many utterances that constitute swearing are subject to severe lexical, phrasal and syntactic constraints which suggest that most swearing qualifies as formulaic language 4. Swearing is emotive language: its main function is to reflect, or seem to reflect, the speaker’s feelings and attitudes. Thus, it can be concluded that epithet or swearing is using taboo word in an utterance without referring to its literal meaning to express the speaker’s feeling and emotion. Therefore, it is commonly found that people do swearing when they hit themselves with a hammer or feel hostile when there is a man crowds in a supermarket check-out line; they want to express their feelings and 20 emotions toward the incidents. It is in line with Jay’s arguments 1992, p. 7 that epithet is yelled at a selected wrongdoer or a person who does something stupid or frustrating in case of a man crowds the check-out line and is uttered serving no corrective purpose as with the targeted use but mainly serving to reduce the anger level of the speaker in case of hitting self with a hammer. The examples of epithet as noted by Jay are shit, damn, hell, son of a bitch, goddamn it, fuck you, fuck off, piss off, Jesus Christ. Jay also proposes insults and slurs. In his view 1992, p. 8, both are verbal attacks on other people. They do not necessarily gain their powers from religious sanctions or social taboos but by denoting real or imagined characteristics of the target. Insults may denote the physical, mental, or psychological qualities of the target whereas slurs may be racial, ethnic, or social in nature and may indicate the stereotyping or prejudice of the speaker. Both function to hurt the person directly through the particular word or phrase. Jay idem also notes that there are insults using animal imagery such as pig, dog, bitch, son of a bitch and there are insults based on social deviations such as whore, slut, bastard, fag, queer . Children’s insults are commonly based on abnormal physical, psychological, or social characteristics such as fatty, four eyes, spaz, weirdo, fag, and wimp. While ethnic and racial slurs such as honkey, dago, nigger, chink, pollack are spoken derogatorily to members of the intended ethnic or race group. Even though insults and slurs are primarily meant to hurt the addressee, they can also be used jokingly or as terms of endearment like found in nigger spoken among African Americans and bitch spoken among girl friends. 21 The last category proposed by Jay is scatology and it is more semantic than pragmatic. According to Jay 1992, p. 9 scatology is the study of excrement; interest in or the treatment of obscene matters. Thus, scatological terms refer to human waste products and processes. Since scatological references are about feces and elimination they appear as poop, turd, crap, shit, piss, piss off, fart. Some people say that only the vulgar would use scatological terms, when a more refined euphemism or technical term could be substituted. According to Jay 1992, p. 9, classifications of the dirty words into categories of usage or semantic taxonomies allows people interested in language to define the different types of reference or meaning that dirty words employ. It can be seen that he combines several different approaches so that some of the categories being sociological, some semantic and a few examining the function of dirty words in use. Nevertheless, these few are interesting since in translation it is more important to preserve the function of the dirty words than its semantic field. For example a swearing like shit can be appropriately translated as sialan because they serve the same purposes in the two languages. The classifications also present that some dirty words can be cross-categorized or being used in more than one way. However, one has to look at the entire sentence and speech context to see how the word was used. Jay gives examples words such as son of a bitch, shit, and Jesus Christ can belong to several categories. Son of a bitch may be an insult or an epithet, shit could be used as scatology, insult, or epithet, and Jesus Christ could be an epithet or profanity. To know what the exact meaning of the word, one cannot look at the word alone but must consider how the speaker uses it. 22 In order to be able to preserve the function of the dirty word and the exact meaning of the word, the first distinction made is to decide whether the dirty words are used denotatively or figuratively. Denotative or literal meaning is the actual meaning of a word. For example in a sentence like He is fucking her, the word fuck is used denotatively meaning a sexual act and thus is essential to the understanding of the sentence. Whereas in a sentence like He is fucking crazy, the word fuck is used for emphasizing the word stupid so that can be left out without harming the understanding of the sentence. In the translation, dirty word used literally cannot be omitted but may be replaced by a less offensive dirty word. If the target language lacks an equivalent dirty word, it is possible that the translator employs a neutral word to express the denotative meaning. In contrast to literal use, dirty words can be used figuratively. Presented in Jay’s categories, it can be seen that words such as bitch in an insult, fuck you in a curse, and shit in an epithetswearing are used figuratively. In these cases, the connotative meaning of the word is more important that its denotative meaning. Even when being used figuratively, dirty words can replace ordinary words or form phrases which can function as many different parts of speech and constitute the basic meaning of sentence. The examples of such use are phrasal verbs like found in fuck something up or fuck somebody over. The translator then should pay attention to this matter by transferring the figurative meaning of the word correctly or finding a vulgar expression with the same meaning in the target language TL though it is not based in the same semantic field. 23 Based on the scheme given, d irty words, or in McEnery’s context known as bad language can serve for different labels. Therefore, McEnery proposes a typology of bad language words based on functional term. Table 2.1 shows the categorization proposed by McEnery 2006, p. 27. Table 2.2. McEnery’s Typology Code Description Example PredNeg predicate negative “the film is shit” AdvB adverbial booster “Fucking marvellous” Curse Curse “Fuck youmehimit” Dest destinational usage “Fuck off” “He fucked off” EmphAdv emphatic adverb “He fucking did it” “in the fucking car” Figurtv figurative extension “to fuck about” Gen general expletive “Oh Fuck” Idiom idiomaticstereotyped phrase “fuck all” “give a fuck” Literal literal usage denoting taboo referent “We fucked” Image image based on literal meaning “kick shit out of” PremNeg premodifying intensifying negative adjective “the fucking idiot.” Pron pronominal form with undefined referent “got shit to do” Personal personal insult referring to defined entity “You fuck” “That fuck” Reclaimed reclaimed usage – no negative intent Niggers Niggaz as used by African American rappers Oath religious oath for emphasis “by God” Unc Unclassifiable due to insufficient context McEnery’s categories appear to be defined primarily according to syntactic and pragmatic criteria so that he explains how a dirty word in that category is distinguished by its function or use. Take the word fuck found in Curse, Dest, and Gen, and Literal categories as the example. The same word fuck, which is most likely to be a verb, serves for different categories. In Curse category, it can be seen that there is a clear insult intended in phrase fuck you with a very clear target 24 for the word you. Word fuck in phrasal verb fuck off belongs to Dest category, not only the intention to some degree is to insult but also a demand being made that the target go away. The word fuck belongs to Gen utterance is used as an expression of general anger, annoyance or frustration. While in the case of Literal category, the word fuck does not have intention to insult, merely an intent to describe an act of coitus. However Ljung 2011: 28, who focuses on study of swearing, notes that some examples such as the utterance Kick the shit out of someone may fall into Image and Idiom category in McEnery’s typology. This is caused by basing the categories on grammatical, pragmatic andor semantic criteria. Therefore, he presents another typology. His categorization scheme features a distinction between functions and themes, where “the functions are the uses that the swearing constructions are put to by the swearers, while the themes are the different taboo areas that these constructions draw on” Ljung, 2011, p. 29. Ljung’s typology is presented in Table 2.3. Based on Table 2.3, the functions fall into two major subgroups, viz. the stand-alones and the slot fillers and a third smaller functional category which is replacive swearing. The stand-alones are swearing constructions that function as utterances of their own. Some of them are speech acts illocutionary acts such as the oaths and the curses, others have a less marked illocutionary character such as the expletive interjections expressing anger, surprise, pain and other feeling. 25 Table 2.3. Ljung’s Typology Functions Stand-alone functions Expletive interjections Oaths Curses Affirmation and contradiction Unfriendly suggestions Ritual insults Name-calling Slot fillers Adverbialadjectival intensifier Adjectives of dislike Emphasis Modal adverbials Anaphoric use of epithets Noun supports Replacive swearing Themes The religioussupernatural theme The scatological theme The sex organ theme The sexual activities theme The mother family name Minor themes ancestors, animals, death, disease, prostitution, etc. The following are the descriptions of stand-alone functions as presented in Table 2.3. The first stand-alone function is expletive interjection. It primarily serves as outlets for the speaker’s reactions to different mishaps and disappointments Ljung, 2011, p. 30. The examples for this function are Shit, Fuck, Oh my God. The next stand-alone functions are oath and curse. According to Ljung, both are the two oldest forms of swearing 2011, p. 97. He states that oath originally functioned to swear by something or somebody to back up the claims made by the speaker by taking God or some venerable being as witness that the claim is true. Theref ore, oaths are typically realized by “the preposition by followed by name of a higher being, as in By God, By Christ, or as constructions based on the frame For ... sakes, as in For heaven’s sake Ljung, 2011, p. 102. Ljung note that curse involves an intension “to invoke a supernatural power to 26 inflict harm or punishment on someone or something”. In the past, curses have religious reference as in May the devil take you but today, curses more often occur in abbreviated forms and often based on other themes, as in Fuck you, I’ll be damned ibid., 2011, p. 31-32. Both oath and curse have been proposed in McEnery’s typology 2006 presented in Table 2.2. In the preceding paragraphs, it can also be seen that Jay 1992 has already discussed curse as one of his categories of dirty words. The next stand-alone function is affirmation and contradiction. Ljung 2011, p. 32 notes certain swearing expression may express contradiction and affirmation of the preceding utterance. However, contradiction is far more common than affirmation like reply of utterance “The lock is broken.” may take forms in “FuckBuggerThe hell it is.” Another stand-alone function is unfriendly suggestion. Ljung 2011, p 32 argues that it is used to express aggression directed at somebody and are often used in dialogue to indicate the speaker’s reaction to what is said. The examples include Fuck off, Go to hell, Kiss my ass. Ljung also notes that there is ritual insult. It is usually all-male affair and connected to the ‘mother theme’ so that the expressions used refer to alleged sexual exploits involving somebody’s mother or even sister. The examples are Your Mother and Your Mother’s. Besides using ‘mother theme’, Ljung also notes that there is name-calling function used to express the speaker’s opinion of the addressee or a third party 2011, p. 32-33. Thus, it is often realized by single 27 pejoratives and other epithets, not to confuse with Jay’s epithet though. The examples include you retardcuntbastard. The second function is the slot filler. As the name indicates, the slot fillers are examples of swearing that serve to make up longer strings. Ljung 2011, p. 30 explains that they range from traditional degree modification such as bloody cold, damned quickly to constructions that are more difficult to analyze as in absobloodylutely. The slot fillers are described in the following paragraphs. Adverbialadjectival intensifier is a slot filler that expresses a high degree of a following adjective or adverb. The examples cover You are so bloody lucky and They drove damn fast. However, Ljung notes that it is frequently impossible to distinguish clearly between expletives used as intensifiers and the same expletives used as emphasizers. Another slot filer function is adjective of dislike. It is to indicate that the speaker dislikes the referent of the following noun. Sometimes this function is hard to distinguish from other meanings and is frequently inextricably linked to the function of emphasis. The examples are He’s a bloody fool, I hate that fucking man. Whereas emphasis is also tends to be realized by adjectives but it does not signify gradation or dislike. Instead, it serves to emphasize or attract attention to the associated item as in What the hell is that?, You don’t have to tell me every bloody time Emphasis may also take the form of infixation in a word as in Absobloodylutely, Infuckingcredible. The next slot filler is modal adverbials but Ljung does not define this concretely. However, it can be deduced from his description and examples that 28 they are disjuncts expressing modality. The examples are No you bloody can’t copy, I bloody well drank my beer, They fucking bought one drink between them. Anaphoric use of epithets is another slot filler function that according to Ljung refers to swearwords used in the same way as personal pronouns. He illustrates it with example Tell the bastard to mind his own business as an answer to the question What am I going to tell Steve? The last slot filler function is noun support in which epithets like bastard, motherfucker lose their negative charge and function as a neutral predicate, and an adjective provides meaning to the sentence. Ljung gives examples that John is boring and Philip is hard-working may also be rendered as John is a boring son of a bitch and Philip is a hard-working bastard. The third function is replacive swearing. Ljung implies that the term is applicable for utterances containing a swear word whose meaning can be interpreted in multiple non-literal ways. The example of such use is I’ve lost the bugger, where bugger can refer to “an object ot person that the speaker can no longer find ” Ljung, 2011, p. 167.

2. Theories of Translation

In this part, the researcher discusses the theories of translation used in the research. The theories cover definition of translation, translation equivalence, meaning in translation, and translation strategies. 29

a. Definition of Translation

Meetham and Hudson 1973, p. 713, as cited by Bell 1997, p. 6, define translation as “the replacement of a representation of a text in one language by a representation of an equivalent text in a second language.” Bell himself in his book ‘Translation and Translating: Theory and Practice’ 1997, p. 5 defines translation as the expression in target language of what has been expressed in source language, preserving semantics and stylistics equivalence.

b. Translation Equivalence

Equivalence is an important aspect in a translation. Newmark 1988, p. 48 states that in the communicative translation of vocative text, equivalent effect is essential as it is the criterion by which the effectiveness and therefore the value is to be assessed. Equivalence happens when there are equivalent items in specific source text-target text pairs and contexts Koller, 1979, as cited in Munday, 2008, p. 47. When a message is transferred from the source language to target language, the translator is also dealing with two different cultures at the same time. Translation equivalence becomes a transfer of the message from the source culture to the target culture and a pragmaticsemantic or functionally oriented approach to translation. Thus, translation equivalence serves as the bridge between the source language and the target language. There are experts who distinguish translation equivalence. Popovic, as cited by Bassnett 1991, p. 25, distinguishes translation equivalence into four types which are linguistic equivalence, paradigmatic equivalence, stylistic translational equivalence, and textual syntagmatic equivalence. 30 Linguistic equivalence is where there is homogeneity on the linguistic level of both SL and TL texts, i.e. word for word translation. Paradigmatic equivalence, where there is equivalence of ‘the elements of paradigmatic expressive axis’, i.e. elements of grammar. Stylistic translational equivalence, where there is ‘functional equivalence of elements in both original and translation aiming at an expressive identity with an invariant of identical meaning.’ Textual syntagmatic equivalence, where there is equivalence of the syntagmatic structuring of a text, i.e. equivalence of form and shape. While Nida and Taber 1964 distinguish two types of equivalences which are formal and dynamic. Formal equivalence ‘focuses attention on the message itself, in both form and content’. It consists of a TL item which represents the closest equivalent of a SL word or phrase. However, there are not always formal equivalents between the two languages. Dynamic equivalence, on the other hand, is based on the principle of equivalence effect, where the relationship between the receiver and the message should be the same as that between the original receivers and the SL message. Here, the translator seeks to translate the meaning of the original in such a way that the TL wording will trigger the same effect on the target culture readers as the original wording did upon the source text readers. Vinay and Darbelnet view equivalence-oriented translation as a procedure which ‘replicates the same situation as in the original, whilst using completely different wording’ Kenny, 1998, p. 342. They also suggest that, if this procedure is applied during the translation process, it can maintain the stylistic impact of the SL text in the TL text. According to Vinay and Darbelnet, equivalence is therefore 31 the ideal method when the translator has to deal with proverbs, idioms, clichés, nominal or adjectival phrases and the onomatopoeia of animal sounds.

c. Meaning in Translation

Nababan 1999, p. 47, quoting Nida 1975, p. 1, states that a word can have several different meaning. The meaning of a word is not only determined by its position in a sentence but also kind of discipline that uses the word. It is commonly found that situational and cultural contexts influence the meaning of a word. In the process of translating, the translator does not only focus on transferring the meaning of a word but also transferring the message. Nababan 2003, p. 48-51 lists five meanings in translation as the following: Acccording to Nababan 1999, p. 48, lexical meaning refers to the meaning of a word that is found in a dictionary apart from its context. For example, the word bad has these six meanings in the dictionary: jahat, buruk, jelek, susah, tidak enak, busuk. To know which meaning is equal to word bad in a translation, it is suggested to read the whole sentence. Grammatical meaning is the opposite of lexical meaning. Grammatical meaning is the relation between language elements in a bigger scope; like the relation of a word with other words in a phrase or a clause. The word can means kaleng or mengalengkan depends on its position in a sentence. In He kicks the can hard, the word can is a noun and acts as object of the sentence but the word can as found in They can the fish is a verb and it functions as predicate of the sentence. 32 According to Kridalaksana 1984, p. 120, as cited by Nababan 1999, p. 49, contextual and situational meaning is “hubungan antara ujaran dan situasi di mana ujaran itu dipakai ”. In other words, contextual meaning is the meaning of a word related to the situation in which the language is being used. Nababan gives example of the use of English utterance “Good morning” said by an employer toward his employee that can be translated as “Keluar” seeing the context that the employee always comes late to the office. Textual meaning is related to the content of a text or a discourse. The meaning of a word can be different according to kind of texts. Take the example of word morphology; in biology text, morphology is a branch of biology that studies form and structure of animal and plants while in linguistics text, it is a branch that studies forms of words. According to Nababan 1999, p. 50, socio-cultural meaning is closely related to socio-cultural aspect of the language user. In Batak Toba language for example, the word marhusip is related to marriage tradition. If it is translated literally into Bahasa Indonesia, the word means berbisik. However in Batak Toba language, marhusip has wider and deeper meaning than berbisik. Therefore, it is suggested that the translator keeps the word marhusip as it is in his translation and provides the readers annotation of the word.

d. Translation Strategies

Suryawinata and Haryanto 2003, p. 67 define translation strategies as the way to translate words, phrases, clauses or maybe the whole sentences if the translated parts cannot be separated into smaller unit to be translated. Newmark