“Hola, Señorita. Do You Like Gazpacho?” Challenges and Trends in the Audiovisual Translation of Linguacultural Otherness in American Multilingual Animated Films and Their Italian Dubbed Version

Abstract

In the last decades, ethnolinguistic Otherness has assumed an increasingly prominent position in many audiovisual products focusing on non-mainstream cultures otherwise quite voiceless in audiovisual media and giving voice to multilingual discourse practices where code-switching stands out as a key conversational strategy in expressing linguacultural diverse identities. This ties issues of on-screen multilingualism to the field of audiovisual translation and raises new challenges as far as the screen representation/translation of linguacultural specificities is concerned. All this is interestingly to be observed in animated films; indeed, since the early 1990s, such important animation production companies as Walt Disney, Pixar, and Dreamworks began to produce ethnically diverse films offering deep sociolinguistic insights into non-dominant countries and populations whose richness is conveyed on the screen by dialogues interspersed with their native languages, acting as vital symbols of their ethnocultural identity. Starting from these observations, this paper aims at looking contrastively and diachronically at how L3s, i.e., languages different from both the language of the original film and the language of the film’s dubbed version, used in instances of turn-specific, intersentential and intra-sentential code-switching, have been dealt with in the original version and in the Italian dubbed version of thirty American multilingual animated films, released between 1991 and 2022. The main objectives of this study are: to verify to what extent the original ethnolinguistic Otherness is either retained for the Italian audience or manipulated in dubbing; to observe whether and how the screen translation studies’ approach in conveying linguistic diversity in animation has possibly changed over the last thirty years; and to point out what can be achieved by audiovisual translation in terms of intercultural/interlingual transmission when autochthonous linguacultures are represented in animated films.