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.

中文翻译：

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解读英国和西班牙警方审讯中的脏话以及被认为具有冒犯性的侮辱行为

尽管脏话翻译不当可能造成严重后果，但学术研究和口译培训中却很少关注侮辱性内容。侮辱的误译可能会影响警察如何看待应受惩罚的罪行的严重性以及如何判断采取何种行动是适当的。这项研究包括两个实验。首先，对英语-西班牙语口译学生（N = 36）进行了一项口译实验，包括在三种不同语境下翻译 30 条侮辱性内容。第二项任务旨在根据母语人士的看法，找出两种语言中每种侮辱行为的可比性。我们收集了母语人士对这些词汇的冒犯性的评分（英国语 N = 204，西班牙语 N = 178）。结果显示，讲西班牙语和讲英式英语的人的攻击性程度存在差异。我们认为，学习侮辱需要成为法律背景下口译培训的一部分。这项研究旨在为这一跨学科领域做出贡献，实际目标之一是将我们的成果应用于专业培训。