Audiovisual translation: compliments and insults in Spike Lee's Bamboozled.

This thesis compares the original version of the screenplay of the 2000-film Bamboozled with the Italian dubbed text, offering an analysis of forty-four compliments and forty-four insults. By deciding to make a comparative study of the expressive speech acts in both versions, the present study includes all the examples in the film. After a brief presentation of the main linguistic features of African American English and a short introduction to audiovisual language and to the relevance of audiovisual translation in the field of Translation Studies, every speech act has been analysed and commented. The contrastive analysis of the original and the dubbed versions has demonstrated that the biggest discrepancies between scripts are probably due to the transposition of lingua-cultural elements. Because of the constraints of the target language itself, several references to the African American community and heritage are omitted in the Italian text. Moreover, while the illocutionary force of dubbed utterances often coincides with the original, slang expressions and sub-standard linguistic traits are almost always weakened or neutralized. This translation choice, although probably closer to the target audience, leads to the loss of lingua-cultural features typical of the African American community, and to the de-contextualization of the characters with the situational as well as the socio-cultural context in which the film is produced.