Language and Identity of the British Indian Teenage Diaspora: Gautam Malkani’s Londonstani, a case study

The work aims to shed some light on the role of language during a crucial step of life when it comes to identity, that is to say youth – the age of uncertainty par excellence, in which every convention, every belief is put into question and re-elaborated. Moreover, the analysis will focus on the teenagers of the British Indian diasporic community, for whom the research of an identity also includes the definition of belonging. In this reconnaissance phase, the issue will be tackled by reading Gautam Malkani’s debut novel, Londonstani (2006). The amazing ability of Malkani is to disclose how the issue of identity is played into language – each attempt to find a definition, to establish or break bonds of belonging, to disobey institutions and to adapt to the rules of a subgroup. Language becomes more than just a tool to communicate: the means becomes the message, transcending its content. The most striking aspect of the language of the Londonstani teens is that they do not speak “pure” English nor Punjabi, but a language made of encounters, clashes, and hybridization. Malkani catapults the reader into a completely unknown linguistic and cultural reality, not making any effort to make the reader feel “comfortable.” Words and sentences from different languages and traditions, references coming from Indian and African American culture are constant and rarely explained. Malkani is there to overturn expectations and to show how many languages become one in a land, in a city (London) that is the symbol of diaspora, a great third space of negotiation and fragmentation, where identities are lost to be found again – new, multifaceted, unstable

Audiovisual Translation and multimodality: Character (re)design from source to target multimodal text. The Chicano gangster stereotype as a case study

The present work aims to expand the scope of research on audiovisual language and translation by taking into consideration the relationship between the audiovisual text and other modes characterising the audiovisual product. The complexity of this kind of product calls for an analytical framework that makes it possible to deal with multiple modes simultaneously. Although intuitively applicable to qualitative research, this kind of analysis has so far been difficult to achieve in larger corpora. In particular, the main focus of this thesis is character design in movies. A character is a recognizable, stereotyped diegetic device, composed of audiovisual as well as textual elements. Movies rely heavily on stereotyped characters to convey messages to the audience and fulfil a specific communicative function based on a set of shared assumptions. The analysis will take as a case study a selection of American movies released between 1988 and 1993 and dubbed into Italian, featuring the stereotypical character of the Chicano gangster. The methodology is informed by descriptive translation studies and multimodality, as well as corpus-based analysis and translation of fictional nonstandard varieties. A linguistic and historical profiling of the chosen character will serve as a toolkit in the final step, the analysis of the movies. First, the analysis will focus on identifying the linguistic variety spoken by the character, with particular attention to its prestige, with the purpose of understanding the way in which the variety of the source text was re-presented in the target text. This will allow the inference of the type of strategies used by the translators. Subsequently, the relationship between linguistic elements and non-textual elements will be analysed to understand the way that intermodal relationships are built in both texts. This will shed light on the communicative meaning conveyed by the character in the multimodal text, and the way it is preserved or transformed through the audiovisual translation process.The analysis will have an initially quantitative approach, so as to outline a general trend in the character design and re-design within the analysed corpus. The data will then be reviewed and interpreted, in order to understand how specific linguistic choices in a multimodal environment are linked to the linguacultural context that generated them

The route to identity: Italian translation and African American language(s) in Spike Lee’s Get on the Bus

This paper investigates translation issues emerging from the analysis of Spike Lee’s movie Get on the Bus (1996) and its Italian adaptation, Bus in Viaggio. The choice is motivated by African American Vernacular English (AAVE), used in the film by a group of men that get on the bus to reach the Million Man March in Washington (1995). During the journey, characters will confront each other on different topics, such as African American male identity in that precise moment and for the future, as well as their role within the black community. As in other movies by Spike Lee, the traditional and stereotyped media portrayal of African American people is challenged and subverted. This dialogical construction poses a set of challenges for the translator/adaptor, especially because it is characterised by a use of language that has no equivalent in Italian. (Un)translatability is the main focus of this research: can idiomatic expressions that are typical of a non-standard variety of English be translated? Which translation strategies have been used? These questions will be analysed through a reading of the speech patterns enacted by one of the characters, the wannabe Hollywood star Flip, a stereotyped portrait against whom each character will fight in order to affirm his identity

“Death is a black camel”: Metaphors, similes, and proverbiality in the stereotyped re-presentation of fictional ethnicity

The paper explores the use of figurative language by Charlie Chan, a fictional Chinese detective protagonist of a series of novels and film adaptations between the 1920s and the 1940s. Chan’s construction as an ethnotype is strongly determined by language choices, including the recurring use of metaphors, similes, and proverbiality. In particular, the research focuses on the classification and analysis of Chan’s figurative speech patterns in the novel The Black Camel (1929), and features both a quantitative survey and qualitative comments on relevant examples. The results show numerous occurrences of figurative language, in a tension between conventional and creative uses, where especially the latter corresponds to a constant effort by the author to create a sense of ‘exotic’ otherness. This confirms that Charlie Chan is mainly constructed with a white orientalist audience in mind, in an attempt to cater for a stereotypical imagery that only occasionally overlaps with faithful ethnic and cultural representation

Audiovisual Translation and multimodality: Character (re)design from source to target multimodal text. The Chicano gangster stereotype as a case study.

The present work aims to expand the scope of research on audiovisual language and translation by taking into consideration the relationship between the audiovisual text and other modes characterising the audiovisual product. The complexity of this kind of product calls for an analytical framework that makes it possible to deal with multiple modes simultaneously. Although intuitively applicable to qualitative research, this kind of analysis has so far been difficult to achieve in larger corpora. In particular, the main focus of this thesis is character design in movies. A character is a recognizable, stereotyped diegetic device, composed of audiovisual as well as textual elements. Movies rely heavily on stereotyped characters to convey messages to the audience and fulfil a specific communicative function based on a set of shared assumptions. The analysis will take as a case study a selection of American movies released between 1988 and 1993 and dubbed into Italian, featuring the stereotypical character of the Chicano gangster. The methodology is informed by descriptive translation studies and multimodality, as well as corpus-based analysis and translation of fictional nonstandard varieties. A linguistic and historical profiling of the chosen character will serve as a toolkit in the final step, the analysis of the movies. First, the analysis will focus on identifying the linguistic variety spoken by the character, with particular attention to its prestige, with the purpose of understanding the way in which the variety of the source text was re-presented in the target text. This will allow the inference of the type of strategies used by the translators. Subsequently, the relationship between linguistic elements and non-textual elements will be analysed to understand the way that intermodal relationships are built in both texts. This will shed light on the communicative meaning conveyed by the character in the multimodal text, and the way it is preserved or transformed through the audiovisual translation process.The analysis will have an initially quantitative approach, so as to outline a general trend in the character design and re-design within the analysed corpus. The data will then be reviewed and interpreted, in order to understand how specific linguistic choices in a multimodal environment are linked to the linguacultural context that generated them

Rappresentatività e variazione linguistica nella traduzione audiovisiva

The underrepresentation of ethnic and linguistic minorities, as well as their stereotyped images, are intrinsic to US society, which seems to want them to disappear in order to survive (Macedo 2013). These minorities are often absent from the screens, and when they appear, they are transformed into stereotypes and used as diegetic devices that the public is able to recognise. Even when the films are produced by minorities, they often end up reinforcing these stereotypes while trying to explain or confute them, ultimately surrendering to their social marginality. Indeed, these representations emerge from policies aiming to delete ethnic difference by stigmatising linguistic (Lippi-Green 1997) or social ones (Bender 2003). The power of cinema lays in its ability to shape memory and reality, actively contributing to social and individual narrations (Fluck 2003). In this sense, translation also plays a crucial role in re-presenting minority images to the target audience (van Doorslaer et al. 2016). The aim of this article is to tackle the issue of minority translation as a way to ensure them access to a broader public, in order to present the latter with their own voice and language. More specifically, this article explores the representativity issue as a matter of access by providing answer to the question: what does access mean for a discriminated minority

Shaping Stereotypes in a Space of Absence: A Linguistic Analysis of Wayne Wang’s “Chan Is Missing”

Wayne Wang’s Chan Is Missing (1981) was acclaimed by the critics and broadly appreciated by the public for its innovative style and its lively depiction of San Francisco’s Chinatown. Academic discourse has focused on the film’s ability to embody the essence of Asian Americans (Tajima 1990), and on the challenges it poses to the common assumptions concerning this specific minority within the United States (Feng 1996). Indeed, the film is a milestone for cinema in general, and for the representation of Asians and Chinese Americans in particular, for it manages to be many different films at the same time. The aim of this paper is to use Systemic Functional Linguistics and Critical Discourse Analysis to investigate the linguistic image construction of Chan (whose name echoes the notorious Charlie Chan from the beginning of the 20th century) within the film. His identikit is (and at the same time fails to be) the outcome of a chorus of different voices. While the two protagonists, Jo and Steve, look for the missing Chan Hung, they talk to several people who have met him. Each character delivers a fragment of a shapeless portrait that does not help the protagonists finding him, actually causing even more confusion on his location and his identity. Each description has little to do with Chan himself, as it only represents the characters’ confrontation with the stereotypes attached to the Asian and Chinese American community. This attempt to use Chan as an image of what each character wants to detach from in order to define themselves is made possible and at the same time invalidated by his continuous absence, which represents the essence of the stereotype itself—only real in the words of the beholder

Re-shaping Languages and Stereotypes in Dubbing. David Ayer\u2019s End of Watch (2013) from Chicano English to Italian.

The present paper aims to investigate the role of language and Italian dubbing in the construction of ethno-types in a movie where Chicano English speakers are portrayed. Textual and non-textual elements will be taken into consideration altogether, in order to account for the multimodal nature of movie characters\u2019 profiles creation. After a general overview on Chicano communities, including historical, linguistic and stereotypical features, the topic will be tackled by taking David Ayer\u2019s movie End of Watch (2013) as a case study, along with the Italian dubbed text. The non-textual features of the movie will prove to be related to the existing tradition of stereotypical portrayals. Source and target text will be analysed quantitatively, so as to find the frequencies of the features that distinguish Chicanos as the different from white Americans: Spanish code mixing and use of slang and profanities. Once explained what the main challenges of translating Chicano language and culture into Italian might be, a presentation of the frequencies of the target version will follow. By observing the procedures adopted by the translators at a micro level, it will be possible to state a hypothesis on which macro-level strategy might have inspired their work. A comparison between the two versions will also allow to infer the diegetic functions of the ethno-types in both source and target text, taking into account both common and dissimilar traits

Recensione del volume Black Englishes. Pratiche linguistiche transfrontaliere Italia-USA di Annarita Taronna

Annarita Taronna, ricercatrice in lingua e traduzione inglese presso il Dipartimento di Scienze della Formazione, Psicologia e Comunicazione dell’Università di Bari, ha da sempre focalizzato la sua ricerca sull’inglese come pratica linguistica, come essenza vivente della condivisione e della trasformazione, in ambiti quali l’inglese come lingua franca (ELF), la traduzione, gli studi culturali e di genere, la lingua e letteratura chicana e afroamericana. Il testo Black Englishes rappresenta un punto di snodo e insieme di svolta nel suo lavoro di ricerca, nell’atto di costruire un ponte che congiunga la tradizione linguistica, culturale e artistica afroamericana con le nuove pratiche nate sullo sfondo delle rotte trans mediterranee