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Part of
Reassessing Dubbing: Historical approaches and current trends
Edited by Irene Ranzato and Serenella Zanotti
[Benjamins Translation Library 148] 2019
► pp. 245–262

Chapter 12
Sleeping with the fishes

Italian Americans in animation

The use of accents and language variation in films is a long established practice that manipulates language as a tool in the construction of characters, so as to convey specific characteristics. This is even more evident in animated films, where language is used as a quick way to build character and reaffirm stereotype. Shark Tale is an animated comedy produced in 2004 by DreamWorks Animation. The characters of the film speak different variations of American English, which are used to attribute different features to them. This paper will focus on a group of characters who present a series of elements (both on a narrative and a linguistic level) that makes it easy to identify them as Italian American Mafiosi, and on the strategies used in Italian dubbing.
Keywords: dubbing, Italian American, ethnolect, sociolect, stereotypes, animation, variation, Mafiosi
Article outline
  • Introduction
  • The Shark Tale issue
  • Shark Tale: Cultural and linguistic representation of Italian Americanness
  • Shark Tale in Italian dubbing
  • Concluding remarks
  • Notes
  • References
  • Films and TV series
Published online: 6 August 2019
DOI logo
https://doi.org/10.1075/btl.148.12par
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2023. The representation of multilingualism in dubbing and subtitling for the deaf and hard of hearing (SDH). Multilingua 42:5 ► pp. 675 ff. DOI logo
Uzzo, Gabriele
2023. Subtitling the Mafia and the Anti-Mafia from Italian into English: An Analysis of Cultural Transfer. Íkala, Revista de Lenguaje y Cultura 28:2 ► pp. 1 ff. DOI logo
Raffi, Francesca
2022. Linguistic variation in Italian neorealist cinema: A multimodal analysis of subtitling. Cogent Arts & Humanities 9:1 DOI logo
Minutella, Vincenza
2021. Linguistic Variation in Animated Films from 2001 to 2017. In (Re)Creating Language Identities in Animated Films, ► pp. 123 ff. DOI logo
Minutella, Vincenza
2021. (Re)Positioning Italianness in Animated Films: No Accent, Foreign Accent, Regional Italian or Dialect?. In (Re)Creating Language Identities in Animated Films, ► pp. 351 ff. DOI logo
Minutella, Vincenza
2021. Translating Language Varieties and Multilingualism in Audiovisual Texts: Research and Conversations with Dubbing Practitioners. In (Re)Creating Language Identities in Animated Films, ► pp. 75 ff. DOI logo
Minutella, Vincenza
2021. Conclusion. In (Re)Creating Language Identities in Animated Films, ► pp. 375 ff. DOI logo

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