Spike Lee’s Bamboozled: A Contrastive Analysis of Compliments and Insults from English into Italian
This book compares the original version of the screenplay of the film Bamboozled (2000) with the Italian dubbed text, offering an analysis of forty-four compliments and forty-four insults. In order to provide a comparative study of the expressive speech acts in both versions, the book includes all the examples of such language use in the film. After a brief presentation of the main linguistic features of African American English and a short introduction to audiovisual language and to the relevance of audiovisual translation in the field of Translation Studies, every speech act in both versions is thoroughly analysed and commented upon. The contrastive analysis of the original and the dubbed version demonstrates that the most noteworthy discrepancies between the scripts are due to the transposition of lingua-cultural elements. Because of the constraints of the target language itself, several references to the African American community and heritage are omitted in the Italian text. Moreover, while the illocutionary force of dubbed utterances often coincides with the original, slang expressions and sub-standard linguistic traits are almost always weakened or neutralized.
Sara Corrizzato received a PhD in English Linguistics from the University of Verona in 2012. Her areas of research include pragmatics, ELT (English Language Teaching), translation theory and audiovisual language. She is currently teaching English Language and Translation at the University of Verona and ESP at the University of Brescia.
“Sara Corrizzato’s work is a seminal project, in that it puts together the world of African American cinema, and the language that goes with it, and pragmatic issues which are crucial for the understanding of relationships between social practices and lingua-cultural themes.”
Professor Roberto Cagliero
Associate Professor, University of Verona
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