In many languages profanity is more than just the seven words you can’t say on television. For example, Quebec French use liturgical profanity. Sounds comical but without being in the culture, you can’t appreciate the power of such phrases. Several years ago I was working with a Japanese developer who was helping us with localization. A co-worker had a book of Japanese slang phrases that included obscenities. We started casually reading the phonetic pronunciations. The Japanese developer would tell us which one were mild curses and which were stronger, without translation. After reading one phrase to him, his face turned bright red and he said “Oh! Very Bad! Very Bad!”. It was nonsense to us but clearly not to him. And we never did find out what it meant.
0 Responses
Stay in touch with the conversation, subscribe to the RSS feed for comments on this post.