Strategies of Glocalization in Audiovisual Translation: Dubbing Ava Duvernay's Selma into Italian

Thirty years on from the exemplary three Selma to Montgomery marches led by Martin Luther King, Ava DuVernay directed the production of a featured movie, Selma, which portrays the complex events that persuasively contributed to the recognition of African Americans’ right to vote. The aim of the film was to celebrate the enormous effort that Martin Luther King and his supporters made in the fight for getting the Civil Rights Acts passed that same year. With the aim of analysing how, and to what extent, King’s oratory skill is exploited to shaping and consequently introducing the iconic figure to the source as well as to the target audience, this essay focuses on Martin Luther King’s linguistic choices both in public speeches and in more private communicative exchanges. The linguistic approach, including a comparative analysis of the two versions, will also shed light on the most relevant changes that the adaptation process for Italian viewers brought about. Such discrepancies (though apparently slight) will prove to be decisively influential in the construction of King’s and other characters’ identities to the point that target viewers can actually encounter ‘different’ characters than in the original version.