Identity-building and language variation in AVT

This paper will address the problem of dubbing linguistic variation in general, and of ethnically marked varieties in particular. The small corpus under scrutiny is the Italian film dubbing of Eat, Pray and Love (2010), and particular attention will be focused on how Elizabeth Gilbert’s speech and cultural identity are rendered in the target version. Diastratic, diatopic and diachronic speech dimensions present in the Italian dubbed version as well as foreign accents present in the original version - and completely neutralised in Italian - make up the list of varieties detected in the corpus and analysed in an attempt to identify the connotative implications they present to target viewers. By examining what we have termed the “re-routing strategy” employed when an AVT product presents culture-bound and multilingual constraints, we will attempt to illustrate that the original skopos of the source text undergoes considerable modification when ‘crossing over’ to the Italian dubbed version.