Desi/Brit-Asian in Italian dubbing

The transposition of linguistic varieties in dubbing always raises several problems that are generally solved by levelling out diatopic variation (Pernigoni, 2005; Bonsignori and Bruti, 2008; Bonsignori, forthc.). Especially in cases like Indian English, a variety that reflects its own cultural ideologies and a certain sense of belonging and identity (Bhatt, 2008), it is even more difficult to render all the sociolinguistic values that come into play at all levels. This paper intends to identify the most characterising linguistic traits of Indian English – or ‘Hinglish’ (Balirano, 2007), the variety of Indian English spoken in England – in a small corpus of four films, namely East is East (1999, D. O’Donnell), Bend it like Beckham (2002, G. Chada), Ae Fond Kiss (2004, K. Loach) and The Namesake (2006, M. Nair), which portray the multilingual and multicultural melting pot in nowadays society of Indian immigrant communities living in the UK and the USA and, above all, the clash/encounter between different linguistic systems – i.e. English and non-English – that gives rise to a sort of ‘hybrid language’ (Balirano and Vincent, 2007). The next step in this analysis is to see whether or not these features are rendered in Italian dubbing, and if so, to pinpoint the most common strategies employed as well as the strategies used for compensation when, on the contrary, the target language cannot find efficient translating solutions. Finally, the last goal is to check if the dubbed version succeeds in expressing the same level of ‘Indianness’ (Bhatt, 2008) of the characters in these films.