Italian American gangsterspeak in Italian dubbing

This research aims to analyze the language variety spoken by Italian American gangsters in five American films (The Godfather III – Coppola 1990; Goodfellas – Scorsese 1990; A Bronx Tale – De Niro 1993; Casino – Scorsese 1995; Donnie Brasco – Newell 1997), and in their Italian dubbed versions. Drawing on the definition provided by Bollettieri Bosinelli et al (2005) of cultural metonymies and on the feature of selective appropriation proposed by Baker (2006), the research means to investigate how the selection of specific verbal traits contributes to the construction of the identity of these characters. Several studies have focused on the stereotyped representations of Italian American gangsters in Hollywood films; on the contrary, little has been written on the language spoken by these characters. Hollywood Italian American gangsterspeak presents a series of specific linguistic characteristics which act at various levels (phonological, syntactic, and lexical) in order to convey both the characters’ ethnicity and their belonging to the group of gangsters. The research intends to identify such characteristics, and to investigate the translation strategies used in Italian dubbing, in order to establish whether the dubbed variety succeeds in maintaining the characterization at the level of both ethnolect and sociolect. The research method is both documentary (as it involves a detailed textual analysis of both the source and the target texts) and interactionist (as it involves the analysis of questionnaires administered to a sample of English native speakers and a sample of Italian speakers, aiming at testing the perception of the connotations of both the source and the dubbed varieties). According to the findings achieved so far, Italian dubbing professionals tend to confer to the language the characteristics of the Sicilian regiolect, while using a certain slang easily recognizable as mafiaspeak. This way they re-construct the identity of the characters selecting another series of metonymies in the target language.