MULTILINGUALISM IN AMERICAN AND EUROPEAN ANIMATED FILMS AND THEIR ITALIAN DUBBED VERSION

This paper investigates the functions fulfilled by multilingualism in a series of animated films and their Italian dubbed version. After discussing the theories on multilingualism within society, drawing particular attention on the communicative strategy of code-switching, we focus on the role multilingualism plays in films and the translation solutions employed to deal with it. With regard to this, scholars like Corrius, Zabalbeaosca, Mareš, Chaume and Díaz Cintas stand out for their research and the results obtained in this field. Given such a premise, we conduct an empirical descriptive and comparative analysis of thirteen American and European polyglot animated films, released between 1992 and 2019, and their Italian dubbed version. We aim at identifying the role of multilingualism in these animated films and the translation solutions adopted in the Target texts (TT) to deal with it. We devote a special attention to the occurrences of Italian as L3ST and how they have been dealt with in the TT. We also embrace a diachronic perspective which allows us to investigate whether and how the functions of multilingualism in the animated films and the translation solutions adopted in the Italian dubbed version have changed over the almost thirty years in which the animated films making up our corpus were released.