Audiovisual film translation: ‘Jamaican English’ to Italian

Abstract

The aimof this paper is to investigate how Italian subtitlers cope with the translation of a non British or American variety of English among the many ‘New Englishes’ in the world; in this case ‘Jamaican English’, or rather, the language spoken on the island of Jamaica which is mainly Jamaican Creole. Examples are provided from the recently restored DVD version (2006) of the 1972 filmThe Harder They Come. The author focuses in particular on exploring cultural aspects as well as generic indicators to determine to what extent Jamaican values and cultural identity traits are linguistically and visually transferred through speech and song (reggae) to an Italian audience. Detail of research methodology is reported with exemplification of translation strategies taken from the discourses in amultimodal conceptual framework.