The Transposition of Cultural Identity of 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, 2009). Especially in cases like Desi/Brit-Asian, a variety that reflects its own cultural ideologies and a certain sense of belonging and identity, 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 Desi/Brit-Asian in a small corpus of films, including 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 South-Asian 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, 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, also checking if the dubbed version succeeds in expressing the same level of ‘Indianness’ (Bhatt, 2008) of the characters in these films. Finally, one last step in this research is to verify whether the same linguistic strategies are actually employed in an original Italian film, namely Oggi Sposi (2009, L. Lucini), to represent Indian filmic speech.