Translating Morphological Hapax Legomena: A Corpus-Assisted Study of Filmic Teen Speech

This study explores the strategies used by professionals to translate language creativity in dubbed movies, with a focus on new words formed via morphological processes. As a case study, movies targeted at teenagers were selected, as language creativity is the quintessence of teenagers’ identities. For this purpose, a parallel corpus of American movies and their Italian dubbed versions was compiled (TFC, Teen Film Corpus). The analysis consists in a combined approach of qualitative and quantitative investigation, i.e. the manual analysis of the corpus was integrated with the use of the software programs Sketch Engine (www.sketchengine.co.uk) and WMatrix (http://ucrel.lancs.ac.uk/wmatrix/). Translation strategies were examined with a dual focus: a formal perspective and a socio-cultural perspective. The formal perspective focused on the linguistic strategies used in Italian to reproduce the same creative effects as in the original versions. The socio-cultural perspective focused on sensitive topics encoded in creative words, whose translation can affect the way youth culture is represented (e.g., references to sex, violence and drug consumption). This theoretical analysis was integrated with a viewer perception test, i.e., a survey administered to a sample of viewers to elicit their reactions to the translation solutions used in the movies. The use of a perception test implies that the analysis of language creativity is not limited to the author’s intuitions, but it is also based on empirical data provided by the actual end-users of the movies.