“Why you talk like a white girl?" Linguistic identities in "Insecure" and its Italian dubbed adaptation

In this era of global media entertainment economy, a growing number of American TV series and sitcoms are written to be transnationally popular and inanticipation of specific viewers (Bielby and Harrington 2008). Some scholars explain the widespread popularity of certain televisual entertainment products by stressing the unique qualities of US culture, which inspire identifications from viewers in many different countries. Others argue that the success of these shows is not based on realism or US multiculturalism. The development of this debate is illustrated by Mirrlees who observes that popular TV series and films “may entail partial and selective representations (not reflections) of the nation, but most products are not realistic or deeply diverse” (2013: 179). He then lists some of the most globally popular prime-time US TV shows that significantly pertain to the genres of fantasy ("Lost", "Prison Break", "Dexter", "True Blood") or generational urban teleplays and medical dramas ("Sex and the City", "Desperate Housewives", "Grey’s Anatomy", "House").

However, in the ever-changing entertainment industry, much of the American narrative lately has had a more nuanced account of the nation that acknowledges the complexity of its cultural possibilities employing casts that reflect the demographic reality of America, whose population is almost 40% non-white. Among the shows produced, written, and starring majority black casts in 2017 are "Atlanta"; "Being Mary Jane"; "Black-ish"; "Chewing Gum"; "Dear White People"; "Empire"; "Greenleaf"; "Insecure"; "Love Ty Neighbor"; "Luke Cage"; "Marlon"; "Power"; "Queen Sugar"; "Rebel"; "Saints & Sinners"; "Shots Fired"; "Survivor’s Remorse"; "Tales"; "The Breaks"; "The Carmichael Show"; "The Haves and the Have Nots"; "The Real Husbands of Hollywood"; "The Quad"; "Underground". In addition, according to a new Nielsen study (For Us by Us, 2017) of what American television viewers are watching, a number of TVshows led by African American actors, or those featuring plot lines explicitly focused on black people, have significantly large non-black audiences. The study examined the viewership numbers of shows like "Black-ish", "How to Get Away with Murder", and "Insecure" and found that well over 60% of the audiences for each show were non-black. Nielsen’s numbers disprove one of the more pernicious and problematic stigmas attached to “black productions”, that they only appeal to black audiences and cannot be financially successful for studios. Shows that feature strong black characters are crossing cultural boundaries to grab diverse audiences and start conversations about inequality and racial justice amongst groups that might not otherwise be engaged in these conversations.

This paper will focus on the dubbing of the TV show "Insecure" into Italian with the aim of investigating the challenges that language varieties pose for the dubbing translator. Our main goal is to determine how the Italian translation of "Insecure" deals with typical markers of African American Vernacular English (AAVE) and the extent to which lexical and discourse markers are either preserved or neutralized in the dubbed version.