I'm starting to think swear words don't translate very well...
When I was in Osaka, a friend taught me some Kansai-ben (Kansai dialect, if you've seen yakuza in movies there's a good chance they're using this dialect), and he said that なんでやねん ("nandeyanen") meant "what the fuck". So imagine my surprise when I get up here and tell people I studied abroad in Osaka, only to have them exclaim very loudly "Oh so do you know 'what the fuck'?" This conversation has happened multiple times with bosses, coworkers, and my teachers, and always sort of takes me by surprise. I'm starting to think なんでやねん doesn't have the same profanity connotation as my friend said it did...
On that note, I spent years seeing words in anime get translated as "you bastard" and "shithead" and "asshole" but then when I got to Japan I noticed students (most all of them boys) calling each other the same words and no one batting an eye. Again, maybe those words don't have the same connotation as I learned.
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