Sex, love and words The translation for dubbing teen series

Abstract

Teen series have already been present for years and represent scenes and situations with which young people and teenagers identify. Nevertheless, not only do they identify with these scenes, but they also recognise the vocabulary and expressions used by their protagonists. Thus, teen series recreate a sort of youth slang which, among other topics of interest to the audience, addresses sexual and love relationships. Through translation, these series reach different countries and a wide range of viewers. In the case of dubbing, despite being based on a prefabricated orality, the dialogues must be as natural as possible so that they are plausible for the target audience. Therefore, the vocabulary related to sexual and love relationships in Spanish should endeavour to produce the same feelings among the target audience as it did among those of the original version.

This paper explores twelve episodes of three teen series broadcast in recent years (2019-2022) both in their original version and in their Spanish dubbed version, with the purpose of analysing the translation challenges derived from the presence of youth language, its potential caducity and the censorship applied, in order to establish our own taxonomy for the classification of the language of relationships. Thus, the conclusion reached is that a very similar number of slang terms are used in both languages, albeit with some interesting differences; yet, in general, viewers of the original version and the dubbed version may have a similar experience.