Difficulty of slang translation

A fundamental problem in translation is the transposition into another language of linguistic varieties which are culture-specific or belonging to a socially restricted speech community. These varieties, revealed through accent, cant, dialect, jargon, slang and vernacular, include forms which rarely have equivalents (i.e. forms that are comparable in meaning and scope) in the target language. This problem poses some serious sociolinguistic issues which are often connected with cultural transition. In this paper I will try to illustrate how complicated it is to find a near ‘equivalent’ translation when dealing with a linguistic variety which departs from standard language. I will concentrate, in particular, on slang and on a corpus of slang expressions collected from three English films (Notting Hill, The Full Monty, Trainspotting). First, I will analyse the contexts of occurrence of the slang and then I will investigate if their respective translations into Italian preserve the meaning of the original and re-create analogous effects. For the purpose of this analysis, a set of descriptive criteria has been attributed to slang. Some of these are speaker-oriented (e.g., group-restriction, informality, time-restriction, subject-restriction, obscenity, vulgarity, unconventionality, localism, secrecy, privacy), as they qualify the speaker as belonging to a distinct group within society; others are hearer-oriented (e.g., playfulness, freshness, novelty, faddishness, humour, strong impression, offensiveness, colourfulness, musicality, aggressiveness), as they are meant to produce a particular effect upon the hearer. And yet more others have characteristics which are intrinsic to slang (e.g., extra-grammatical morphology, semantic indeterminacy) and which should also correspond to analogous characteristics in the rendering in the target language. As many of the foregoing criteria are mutually exclusive, slang expressions do not meet all of them simultaneously. However, they should meet at least some of them, my hypothesis being that an appropriate translation of a slang expression should be re-analysable according to the same descriptive criteria as the original form, and should achieve the same pragmatic effects.