Constructing youth identities in dubbed movies. A view from Italy

This study aims to make a contribution to the area of linguistic and cultural representation in audiovisual texts by contrastively analysing how scriptwriters and translators construct the image of American and Italian youth culture. The main focus of the investigation is the translation of potentially challenging topics such as teenage sexuality, drug consumption, and violence. The analysis is based on a small, self-compiled parallel corpus of American teen movies and their Italian dubbed versions pertaining to the genre of “teen queen movies”, which depict the school life of teenagers and the contrasting relationships among different cliques and gangs (Driscoll 2011: 57). The results of the analysis revealed a change in target cultural norms with respect to previous decades. Sensitive topics tend to be retained rather than mitigated, which indicates that licentious and unrestrained behaviours on screen are regarded as more desirable than in the past.