Translating slanguage in British and American films: a corpus-based analysis

Considering screen translation as a transcoding process focussed not merely on language transfer but also on cross-cultural transfer (Toury 2012 [1995]), language use and translation processes in films are important vehicles in weaving relations of cultural identity and in conveying them to the audience. This is especially the case with language varieties that are deeply embedded in the socio-cultural context of the country or community in which they are spoken (Munnich et al. 2001) and whose equivalents in another language are difficult to find. This study sets out to investigate the main translation strategies relevant to slanguage in Italian dubbing, relying upon data stored in the Pavia Corpus of Film Dialogue (henceforth PCFD), a parallel corpus of American and British films and their dubbed versions in Italian (Pavesi this volume; Freddi and Pavesi 2009). The first part of the chapter is devoted to a brief presentation of the literature on English slang and offers a working definition that is applied in the identification and classification of slang and swear words occurring in the English component of the corpus. In the second part of the paper, the most frequent slang expressions found in the PCFD are investigated from a translational angle by exploring the dubbed Italian versions of the films. The analysis focusses on the three main strategies followed by translator-adaptors in rendering slanguage in the target language, namely equivalence, downtoning and omission, which are discussed both qualitatively and quantitatively.