"I'm going to f***** kill you!" Verbal censorship in dubbed mafia movies

Since the dialogues of audiovisual works are written with the purpose of representing spontaneous spoken language (“written to be spoken as if not written”, Gregory and Carrol 1978:42), it is not surprising that taboo language is one of the features, together with slang and non-standard forms, that characterize many contemporary products, especially films. Indeed, such elements contribute to characterizing the language variety spoken both at the diamesic, and at the diaphasic and diastratic levels. As Pavesi and Malinverno (2000: 76) observe, these features have become even more common in a recent stream of American films, such as, among the others, mafia and gangster films. Indeed, taboo language is one of the verbal cultural metonymies (Bollettieri Bosinelli et al 2005: 405-427) that characterize the variety spoken by Italian Americans in mafia movies as a sociolect, as it contributes to conveying the characters’ belonging to the group of mobsters. Several studies conducted on Italian dubbing reveal a general tendency to attenuate the level of obscene expressions present in the original films (Parini 1998: 208-209; Pavesi and Malinverno 2000: 77; 82; Chiaro 2000: 29; Pavesi 2005: 47). Sometimes this is due to the differences in the levels of tabooization of certain fields between the two cultures, on other occasions taboo expressions are not translated because of a lack of semantic and functional correspondence between English and Italian, while some other times the mitigation of taboo language in Italian dubbing is not ascribable to formal constraints, but is rather due to policies of censorship or even self-censorship. Indeed, attenuating the level of vulgarity of the language of American films is quite the norm in Italian dubbing, and it is often the translators themselves who level out the language, in compliance with the requests of the dubbing and production companies. The analysis of the Italian dubbed versions of five American mafia movies released in the 90s confirms this tendency, as is shown in this paper.