Ethnolects and sociolects in dubbing. The case of Italian American gangsterspeak translated into Italian

Screen dialogue is, by its own nature, a “counterfeit”. Taylor (2006: 37-51) refers to the variety spoken in films as “film language” or “filmese”, to emphasize the fact that it is a language with its own features which differs from authentic spontaneous spoken language. Yet, if this is a fact, it should also be noted that film dialogues are written with the ideal intention of reflecting real language, so to create an illusion of naturalness: they are “written to be spoken as if not written” (Gregory and Carrol 1978: 47). As Pavesi (2005: 32) notes, if we compare the dialogues of the first “talkies” to those of more recent times, it is possible to observe a growing effort on the part of screenwriters to reproduce in film dialogues the peculiar traits of spontaneous spoken language, from a careful use of lexis, even slangy or dialectal, to a more fragmented syntax, and a more varied pronunciation, even geographically and socially connoted. It goes without saying that in order for this “aesthetic illusion” to be maintained in a dubbed product, the translation has to be careful in transferring the features that connote the source language at the various levels. This paper aims to describe how the dialogues of Hollywood films starring Italian American gangsters manage to convey the specific ethnic and social origins of the characters, and the strategies used by Italian dubbing professionals to preserve the connotations of the originals.