Multilingualism in film and audiovisual translation. How interlanguages develop on screen.

This thesis aims to explore some linguistic issues related to multilingual films. Particularly, I intend to analyse how second languages have been represented on screen, both in the English version and the Italian version of films, in order to find out if the interlanguages are characterized by specific features and recurrent patterns. Moreover, another fundamental goal of this project is to observe whether the characters’ interlanguage development adheres to that described in second language acquisition, or whether the second languages spoken by multilingual characters have been depicted by employing patterns of stereotyping with regard to the use and the speakers of other languages. This study has been divided into five chapters in order to investigate the broad and complex field of multilingualism. Chapter 1 firstly provides a definition and a classification of multilingualism, and, then, it introduces the relevant scholarly findings on multilingualism in real life. There, I discuss how the several languages of the world can come into contact, and I explain the common distinction between individual and societal multilingualism. In chapter 2, the focus is on how multilingualism is represented in fictional texts. In my discussion on formal aspects, I illustrate the functions played by multilingualism on screen, and I introduce the distinction, based on a taxonomy proposed by Mareš, between films where languages other than English are present in the dialogues, and those where these languages are replaced with English, as if in a translation. In addition, I have taken into account the various translation types, strategies and processes with which it is possible to translate multilingual films. Chapter 3 presents the corpus, made up by four films and a TV series, which were chosen for the analysis, and discusses the criteria for their selection. For each film and the TV series, I have decided to add a data sheet, including all the technical information about the film (or the TV series), the plot, and I have specified which interlanguages have been taken into consideration for the analysis. In chapter 4, the analysis of the interlanguages at stake is carried out, and, in the concluding chapter 5, the results are finally discussed.