Do wop or greaseball carry the same semantic meaning as mangiamaccheroni? Is muso giallo an adequate translation of chink or zipperhead? Do such insults exist in the Italian lingua-culture or are they inventions of audiovisual translators? Controversial and politically loaded, racial slurs have been studied from various interdisciplinary perspectives but from a Translation Studies standpoint this culture-bound lexical minefield is largely unexplored. The present enquiry investigates the meaning transfer of racial insults and taboo language across the language pair English/Italian. In a case...