(In)direct offense. A comparison of direct and indirect translations of German offensive language into Basque

This article describes the translation of offensive language in the language pair German–Basque. The data were retrieved from a corpus of 33 original texts of German children's literature and their corresponding translations into Basque, but also into Spanish in cases in which the translation was conducted indirectly through the Spanish version. Therefore, direct and indirect translations were compared, paying special attention to the translation laws suggested by Toury, i.e. the standardization law and the law of interference. The results show that both laws hold when translating offensive language in children's literature, but with different nuances depending on whether the translation is direct or indirect. Moreover, the analysis proved that in the case of minority languages the spectrum of (in)directness is quite diffuse and that different types of translations exist with different degrees of (in)directness and, therefore, different degrees of standardization and interference.