Email this article “Sunt! That’s French with a cedilla!” Subtitling and dubbing The Boys in the Band into Italian
Abstract
Voice is one of the means through which fictional people are characterised in audiovisual products. Through their voice, characters reveal their thoughts and personalities, including external and internal elements, such as their age, geographical and social origins, gender and sexuality, among others. The linguistic variety analysed in this article is the audiovisual fictional representation of gayspeak, which is used to index characters’ homosexuality. This is a case study that focuses on the subtitling and dubbing of the 2020 Netflix adaptation of The Boys in the Band, which is an American drama film based on the homonymous play written by Mart Crowley in 1968; it can be considered a seminal work for gay literature, in that it is allegedly one of the first plays to address homosexuality openly, something that had never been seen before. The original script in English, the Italian subtitles and the script of the Italian dubbing will be analysed in parallel, with particular attention to some scenes which will be selected and discussed on the basis of their relevance in the use of gayspeak and its translation. This research focuses on the excerpts that creatively deviate from the original text, at least in one of the two audiovisual modalities analysed.
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