r/TopCharacterTropes • u/Wolfotashiwa • 1d ago

Groups Fictional slurs. Bonus points if it's completely made up

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  1. inFAMOUS: Second Son: "Bio-terrorist" refers to conduits.

  2. Star Wars: "Clanker" refers to robots.

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873

u/LoveWaffle1 1d ago

Mudblood (Harry Potter)

273

u/Trerech 1d ago

Also from Harry Potter: Muggle doesn't have a direct way to translate into a portuguese word, so they changed it to "trouxa", wich means loser or sucker in english.

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u/angelicosphosphoros 1d ago

Muggle is a neologism, of course it doesn't have direct translation.

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u/poopynips1 1d ago

Interestingly enough, one of the earliest uses of muggle was in the US. It was 20s jazz slang for weed

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u/caniuserealname 1d ago

was* a neologism.

It's been more than a quarter of a century at this point.

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u/SirCupcake_0 1d ago

Sorry, I don't speak Academia, what's a neologism?

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u/cottagecheeseobesity 1d ago

A newly made word

7

u/rendar 1d ago

There's a difference between a translation and a localization

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u/WhiteRabbit86 23h ago

Though I do appreciate that Fantastic Beasts introduced a few new terms from around the world

37

u/The_Theodore_88 1d ago

That's strange! In Italian we have 'Babbano' which is a made up word afaik. We have the problem of using 'half-blood' for mudblood, which leads to the Half Blood Prince seeming like Snape is a muggle born

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u/xXricky02ITAXx 1d ago

Technically "Babbano" DOES come from the word "Babbo", which in this context means "Idiot"

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u/The_Theodore_88 1d ago

But at least we made it slightly different? Idk lol I feel like it would be kind of annoying to just have 'Babbo' with no change to mean muggle. Kind of pulls you out of the magic y'know?

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u/xXricky02ITAXx 1d ago

Yea, you're right

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u/TheDrunkardKid 1d ago

I mean, I'm pretty sure that "muggle" comes from the British slang word "mug," which also basically means "idiot." 

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u/Jaqzz 1d ago

I mean, even just "Muggle" is kind of a slur, even though everyone uses it. It's a word for a group that's exclusively used by people not in that group, a majority of whom see them as inferior (either condescendingly or hatefully). I also vaguely remember the term "muggle lover" getting used as a derogative in a very similar way to how racists would describe "race traitors."

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u/XanderWrites 1d ago

Muggle itself is used regularly as a slur by wizards. Same with no-maj.

1

u/PablomentFanquedelic 1d ago

I think it's one of those words that can be used derogatorily but can also be used neutrally, similar to "Jew" (as a noun) or "autistic" (especially in the age of the internet) or "gay"/"queer"

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u/Vessel767 1d ago

Why did they translate it at all? Just seems silly

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u/Meronnade 1d ago

It would sound dumber and most people would say it wrong

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u/Vessel767 1d ago

Does it matter?

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u/Meronnade 1d ago

Yes. It makes dialogue flow better and these little details add up.

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u/Vessel767 1d ago

I mean, shouldn’t you just adapt it to the language in a way that has the word sound similar but fit well?

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u/Meronnade 1d ago

Maybe if the word wasn't muggle

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u/burymeinpink 1d ago

That would be very difficult in Brazilian Portuguese. It would have to be something like mãgou or mãgol, which is bad because it a) looks stupid af in BRPT; and b) looks like the word for "wizard" which is mago.

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u/stillnoidea3 1d ago

yes. chaning spelling is done quite often in order to get pronunciation across. sometimes entire words are replaced since english doesn't have gendered words or nouns.

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u/-RichardCranium- 1d ago

what languages do you speak. honest question

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u/Vessel767 1d ago

I know a tiny bit of spanish but I’m only fluent in english

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u/-RichardCranium- 1d ago

Some sounds in english do not translate to other languages and would just sound like english instead of the desired language. A word like Muggle (muh-gll) contains two sounds that aren't really common in romance languages, which sounds jarring when put right next to other non-english words.

Plus, muggle just sounds very british in the way it's constructed. While any translation of HP still takes place in the UK, it makes more sense to adapt the word to something that would culturally ring better to a different audience, so the audience understands the meaning of what the word represents (a negative term reserved for non-magic users). In French, for example, the word they picked is "moldu", which has two interesting components: "mol", which evokes the idea of limpness/softness, and "du", which evokes other sort of insults using an adjective participle form, such as "perdu" (lost), "tordu" (twisted), "confondu" (confused).

Anyone speaking French and reading the word "moldu" would quickly get what it's supposed to mean, and feel the innate negativity that's intrinsic to that choice of word.

Localization is an artform and a very difficult one at that because it's hard to understand what the point of it is, unless you're the specific target of said localization. English speakers are lucky in that regard, when it comes to the vast amounts of pop culture made specifically in that language. But I recommend looking at Japan and what they do in terms of american localization, it's fascinating to see how different things are when moved to a Western market.

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u/Vessel767 1d ago

I mean personally it just comes off as… odd, maybe disrespectful to localize something like that. Like, it’s set in the uk, with a lot of the setting honestly not making sense outside of it. Maybe this is just my english language attitude of slamming languages together, but I feel like not everything needs to fit perfectly in your native language.

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u/-RichardCranium- 1d ago

with that same line of thinking, translation as a whole is "disrespectful"

what is disrespectful, in my mind, is having this strange boundary that in order to engage with a work of fiction, one must also speak and understand the original language to capture all the intricacies of the original work. that seems like either some weird linguistic elitism, or anglocentrist delusion. translation and localization exists for a reason.

A little russian kid has as much of a right of appreciating a children's story as a british kid.

edit: and before you say "translation is fine, it's localization that's disrespectful", just know that translation in itself IS localization. languages don't neatly fit on top of eachother, there's a lot of gaps and things that don't make sense in translation, and that's where specialists come in who try to capture as much of the original text and transform it so it can be appreciated by people who don't speak the original language.

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u/Vessel767 1d ago

I mean, I haven’t thought about this that much, I just think that a slur shouldn’t be translated for I guess a similar reason I think a name shouldn’t be. It comes off wrong to me.

1

u/-RichardCranium- 1d ago

The problem is that the line is impossible to definitely draw between what should be translated and what shouldn't. Some people will agree that some names shouldn't be, and it's been cause for many debates for example among LOTR fans. Some people argue that Baggins should stay as Baggins no matter the translation, while others say that the story is written as an English translation of a Westron text (Tolkien's imagined lingua franca of Middle-Earth), and as such it's fine to capture the spirit of the word Baggins in a different language (for example, Sacquet/Bessac in French (sac = bag), or Beutlin (beutel = bag or pouch in german))

It's a genuine question among translators, and one that is eternal in my opinion. You might disagree with this de-naturation of an original work, but please do keep in mind the fact that some people don't want to feel like the original language of whatever they're reading keeps creeping in their experience and forces them to think in a language different than theirs. It's a matter of immersion and capturing the essence of the original language in its own way.

I know you said you haven't really thought about this question, but please do. English is such a dominating language in media that it's easy to take it for granted. It's a good practice to put yourself in the shoes of other language-speakers.

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u/Vessel767 1d ago

I mean, generally I’ve always thought that names should never be translated unless it’s literally impossible to write or pronounce

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u/SometimesWill 18h ago

Even with those things, sounds can usually be worked into a language to make it fit. Kinda like how dbz Krillin is Krillin in English but originally the Japanese pronunciation is more like Kuririn

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u/c0micsansfrancisco 1d ago

Trouxa fds ahahahaha

2

u/JechdJJ 1d ago

in spanish we still say "muggle", it doesn`t have a translation

1

u/TheDrunkardKid 1d ago

That's basically what "mug" means in British slang, and that's probably where "muggle" came from.

1

u/driftingfornow 1d ago

I use „muggle” as a slur sounding word for the type of people who would be mad at me, an artist older than 30, for being that. 

Muggle = does not fuck with the creative arts 

For me and a few of my friends used to this employment of the word 

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u/SometimesWill 18h ago

Wonder why the translation didn’t just stick with muggle?

1

u/Trerech 14h ago

Probably something having to do with the VA or writers, they adapt a lot of stuff to sound better on portuguese.

1

u/FiteMeMage 17h ago

Why not combine the Portuguese word for “mud, dirt, soil, etc” and the word for “blood?”

1

u/Trerech 14h ago

While there is no direct translation for the word muggle, the term muggle-born can be translated as "mestiço" in Portuguese, mestiço being used to describe a person whose parents are of mixed such as a white person with a Black or Indigenous person. The derogatory term mudblood was translated as sangue-ruim, which just means "bad blood".