Re-shaping Languages and Stereotypes in Dubbing. David Ayer’s End of Watch (2013) from Chicano English to Italian.

The present paper aims to investigate the role of language and Italian dubbing in the construction of ethno-types in a movie where Chicano English speakers are portrayed. Textual and non-textual elements will be taken into consideration altogether, in order to account for the multimodal nature of movie characters’ profiles creation. After a general overview on Chicano communities, including historical, linguistic and stereotypical features, the topic will be tackled by taking David Ayer’s movie End of Watch (2013) as a case study, along with the Italian dubbed text. The non-textual features of the movie will prove to be related to the existing tradition of stereotypical portrayals. Source and target text will be analysed quantitatively, so as to find the frequencies of the features that distinguish Chicanos as the different from white Americans: Spanish code mixing and use of slang and profanities. Once explained what the main challenges of translating Chicano language and culture into Italian might be, a presentation of the frequencies of the target version will follow. By observing the procedures adopted by the translators at a micro level, it will be possible to state a hypothesis on which macro-level strategy might have inspired their work. A comparison between the two versions will also allow to infer the diegetic functions of the ethno-types in both source and target text, taking into account both common and dissimilar traits.