The Lingua-cultural Importation of African American Identity in the Italian Dubbed Version of Spike Lee's Bamboozled

The process of translating audiovisual texts always implies a cultural process: in fact, every word that the audience of both the source and target cultures hears can be considered as the product of several factors, which are part of a multifaceted system composed of verbal and visual elements. More specifically, the language includes specific connotations which are irreversibly linked to the situational as well as the socio-cultural context of the film. With its story and the themes it deals with throughout the plot, Bamboozled, produced by the Afro-American filmmaker Spike Lee, is a product which includes many specific cultural references to the Afro-American environment and black heritage. The dubbed version of the script addressed to the Italian audience tends to weaken or lose some of this ethnic group’s mono-cultural traits in favour of a target-oriented translation, which aims at importing and reconfiguring the contents of the film and, therefore, the representation of blackness.