“Ayuh!”: Stephen King’s accented characters go to the cinema

Stephen King is one of the most popular and best-selling contemporary American writers, as well as one of the most prolific ones. Moreover, he is one of the most adapted authors ever. Apart from the distinguishing horror atmosphere and the presence of supernatural elements, there are other features that characterize his works, and one of them is undoubtedly the use of accents to describe the way his characters speak (and, consequently, their geographical origins), through the technique of eye dialect (Krapp 1926), which consists in using unconventional spelling to indicate particular pronunciations. Distinct geographical accents generally tend to be used also in the dialogues of the audiovisual adaptations of King’s works. This study investigates the use of geographical accents in Stephen King’s Pet Sematary and in its two film adaptations (1989 and 2019), as well as the strategies (if any) used to transpose them in both the Italian translation of the novel and in the Italian dubbed versions of the two films. It is a well-known fact, indeed, that the translation of geographical varieties turns out to be particularly challenging both for literary translators and for dubbing dialogue writers