the Spanish, I did not incur this loss of meaning and remained faithful to the ST culture.

2.5. Swear words

Translating swear words was particularly challenging because I had to consider the differences in swearing behaviour between the source and target culture: the prevalence of swearing and the levels of acceptability of taboo language. Landers suggests that the translator should seek ‘emotional, not literal, equivalents’ when translating swear words (2001, p. 151). In ‘El apuntamiento’, I translated swear words based upon the emotional force that I detected behind these expletives, as opposed to translating each swear word literally and pairing it with an equivalent in English. Early in the story he uses the phrase no me jodan [129] to indicate his exasperation. In this instance, I thought the emotional equivalent in English would be you must be joking, as opposed to the more literal fuck off. In other instances, I translated the verb joder as to screw [150, 176, 183, etc.].

3. Dialect

3.1. Dialect strategy

One of the greatest challenges when considering cultural equivalence on a linguistic level was the use of dialect in ‘El apuntamiento’. Dialect has been defined as ‘a language variety with features of accent, vocabulary, syntax and sentence formation […] characteristic, and therefore indicative, of the regional provenance of its users’ (Haywood, et al., 2009, p. 271). I contended w