Dirty Dubbese: Dubbing as a Means of Taboo Language Transfer from English into Italian

Abstract

Taboos and taboo language are culture-specific, although overlapping areas do exist between different lingua-cultural systems (Pavesi and Malinverno 2000). When it comes to tele-cinematic products, the use of intensifying expletives seems to be increasingly frequent in English source texts whereas (self)censorship still prevails in Italian dubbese. Yet, taboo language is present in Italian dubbese as a footprint left behind by over-mechanical adaptations, offering word-for-word renderings of the source text and resulting in the so-called “doppiaggese”: this hybrid language is a pseudo-colloquial variety of Italian, characterized by routine translations, cliched phrases or sentences, repetition/redundancy and, more importantly, by calques from the source language (Rossi 1999; Alfieri et al. 2003; Sileo 2018).This essay analyzes taboo language transfers from English into Italian through dubbing, by providing examples from dubbed products and relying on corpora of contemporary spoken and written Italian as well as on dictionaries of the Italian language. Transfer phenomena are categorized based on both qualitative and quantitative criteria: as in Toury 1995, they are divided into either positive or negative transfers; on the basis of previous work by this author (Sileo 2018), an additional qualitative categorization is proposed, contrasting semantic and structural calques; moreover, a quantitative criterion takes into account the “size” of calques – ranging from lexical or word-level to sentence-level interferences. The aim is to determine whether and to what extent “dirty” dubbese has been influencing the taboo language production of Italian native speakers. The analysis revealed that the transfers are mainly of a negative type and cross word-unit borders, embracing more structured and more extended phrases; semantic calques seem to be scarcely present. This study, in spite of its limitations, might serve as a starting point for more extensive and in-depth analyses of presumable interferences from English into Italian.