Censorship in Translating Swear Words into Chinese: Using The Catcher in the Rye as an Example

Abstract This paper concentrates on the censorship in translating swear words in The Catcher in the Rye. Shi Xianrong and Sun Zhongxu’s Chinese translations are used for the analysis. The text analysis and statistics indicate that more changes were made in Shi’s version, which appeared in the forms of deletion, attenuation, and modulation. These changes, on the one hand, resulted from the censorships imposed by the legal and administrative requirements on publishing and editing. On the other hand, the peculiar sociocultural context of misogynistic homophobia in the People’s Republic of China (prc) in the late 1980s was also normative and decisive to translators’ choices, especially when a swear word was related to homosexuality or sexual content.