This paper aimed at 1) analyzing the frequency and usage of swear words used in the movie of The Wolf of Wall Street which once set a new Guinness World Records for most swearing in one film and 2) investigating the translation strategies used in subtitling swear words in L2 of Korean based on the Pederson’s seven strategies. The movie was found to have used 50 different kinds of swearwords among which fucking topped the list with the frequency of 354, followed by fuck, shit(s), Jesus, motherfucker(s), fucked, ass, dick, bitch, jerk, and bullshit. Analyzing a total of 798 sentences of the movie, the researcher analyzed the translation strategies by the seven strategies: retention, specification, direct translation, generalization, substitution, omission, and official equivalent. The four strategies—retention, specification, and official equivalent—were never used in translation while the three strategies of substitution, omission, and direct translation were used in translating the target swearwords.
It was found that the direct translation strategy was least used compared with the omission and substitution, which can be explained as the direct translation often relies on a simple rendering of source language pronunciation into the target language and the strategy appears inappropriate for languages with totally different alphabets including English and Korean. Both substitution and omission strategies accounted for around 97% of all the translation strategies. The researcher suggested what would be necessary for more authentic and natural subtitles of swearwords from English into Korean such as a need to set up more realistic and authentic rules and regulations on a permissible range of swear words in subtitles.