ELF: Sociocultural Characterization and ILF Reformulation Strategies in the Migration Movie It's a Free World

This paper explores the socio-cultural and linguistic characterisations of a group of migrant workers in both original English and Italian dubbed/subtitled versions of the migration movie It’s a Free World... (In questo mondo libero..., Ken Loach, 2007). Scenes are selected on the basis of their relevance to the main objective of the study, i.e. to analyse the pragmalinguistic aspects of the perception of the migrant workers in their work context characterized by power-asymmetry relationships between high-status SE speakers and low-status immigrants. It is argued that in this movie ELF variations should be identified not only in the lexico-syntactic properties of the language, but in the asymmetrical relations identified in the dialogic ‘moves’ (Guido, 2008) and distinctive traits of the speech (brevity of sentences, disfluency of rhythm) also within a comparative-discourse framework (cf. Brown & Yule, 1983; Provenzano, 2008) as well as in relation to the perlocutionary dimension of the dubbing translation, since the source and target scripts of a number of selected interactions shall be analysed in order to enquire into the Italian translation strategies for the dubbing and subtitles. In fact, the dubbed version resorts to Italian lingua-franca reformulation strategies by means of specific lexical and structural features deviating from standard uses (Seidlhofer, 2011), consistent with the original illocutionary and perlocutionary dimensions (Austin, 1962). Subtitles, instead, because of spatial and temporal constraints (Díaz Cintas, 2005; Neves, 2009), condense the original utterances (Bogucki, 2011) and retextualising the features of the ELF variation adopted into standard Italian, providing a target version that is not the pragmalinguistic equivalent of the source script.