The role of the translator in the dubbing of teen series. The case of "Sex Education" and "Euphoria"

Teen series centre their plots on young teenage stories and represent the maturation process and the identity of each generation (Fedele, 2021; Raya et al., 2018), so it is important to have characters who speak the exclusive jargon of their congeners. This portrayal of young people's mindset and speech, however, may vary across cultures, as each group establishes its own linguistic and referential frameworks to address certain topics and taboos, leading to different and distinctive pragmatic purposes and subtleties (Fuentes, 2015). Therefore, language becomes a living and creative tool for communication (Santos, 1997, p. 457) which every audiovisual translator must be able to interpret so as to endow the target text with the same dynamism and connotations. One of the most difficult challenges could then be to transfer the subtleties that make up the characters’ personality and idiosyncrasy. And, what is more important, given the strong oral nature of dialogues, these transferences should preserve orality and remain as natural as possible for the target audience to accept them. Otherwise, and also linked to the dubbing process, spectators may suffer from what is known as the “dubby effect”, that has been described as “anything that is not speech-like –jarring diction or awkward wording– or is conspicuously out of time with how actors’ mouths are moving on screen” (Goldsmith, 2019 cited in Sánchez-Mompeán, 2021, p. 185).

This article aims to highlight the human role in the translation process by looking into fundamental aspects such as the identity of the characters, the presence of sexual language, cultural taboos, neologisms, young adults' sociolanguage, and the ephemeral and changing nature of this language. For this purpose, the language used by the protagonists of Sex Education (Nunn, 2019) and Euphoria (Levinson, 2019), two teen series that have become a great success recently, will be categorised and analysed, based on an interview conducted with the translator of both series for this investigation, and resorting to previous studies on this topic (Botella & Ogea, 2022; Ogea & Hidalgo, 2021; Igareda & Aperribay, 2012), as well as to the taxonomies available for the study of taboo language (Fuentes-Luque, 2015; Cestero, 2015; Ávila-Cabrera, 2014; Surià, 2014; Allan & Burridge, 2006, etc.) and of the juvenile lexicon (Mitkova, 2007; Rodríguez, 2002, etc.) in order to create our own taxonomy of the language of relationships and to study its translation from English into Spanish. The results demonstrate the rapidly changing and evolving nature of the language of teenagers, as well as the key role played by the translator in this cultural mediation work, in order to create a target audiovisual text that maintains the characteristics of the series and meets the audience expectations.