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.
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Films and TV series
The Godfather. Francis Ford Coppola. 1972. USA.
The Godfather: Part II. Francis Ford Coppola. 1974. USA.
The Godfather: Part III. Francis Ford Coppola. 1990. USA.
Goodfellas. Martin Scorsese. 1990. USA.
Shark Tale. Vicky Jenson, Bibo Bergeron and Rob Letterman. 2004. USA.
The Sopranos.. David Chase. 1999–2007. USA.
Cited by (8)
Cited by eight other publications
Bruti, Silvia
2024. Viewing Multilingual Films in the Original and Translated Version(s): What Message Do Audiences Receive?. In The Palgrave Handbook of Multilingualism and Language Varieties on Screen, ► pp. 239 ff.
Rezvani Sichani, Behnam, Mahmoud Afrouz & Ahmad Moinzadeh
2023. The representation of multilingualism in dubbing and subtitling for the deaf and hard of hearing (SDH). Multilingua 42:5 ► pp. 675 ff.
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.
Raffi, Francesca
2022. Linguistic variation in Italian neorealist cinema: A multimodal analysis of subtitling. Cogent Arts & Humanities 9:1
Minutella, Vincenza
2021. Linguistic Variation in Animated Films from 2001 to 2017. In (Re)Creating Language Identities in Animated Films, ► pp. 123 ff.
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.
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.
Minutella, Vincenza
2021. Conclusion. In (Re)Creating Language Identities in Animated Films, ► pp. 375 ff.
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