Clandestine Ballrooms, Subversive Communities: Translational Challenges in the Italian Adaptation of "Pose"

Set in the context of 1980s New York City, Ryan Murphy, Brad Falchuk and Steven Canals’ TV series Pose offers a nuanced depiction of the marginalised identities and sexualities that populate the underground dimension of American black queer ballroom culture. Being allowed to exist only as a nightlife community, queer – and more specifically trans – characters in the series are able to constitute a supportive network that eludes societal constraints, constituting relations that replace lost familial bonds (Covella 2023). Within a framework of audacious fashion choices and body movements, the construction of the characters’ language plays a pivotal role in the manifestation of queer identities and in the conservation of the community’s cohesion. However, trans characters’ original speech is peculiarly rendered in the Italian adaptation of Pose, with the adoption of harsher linguistic expressions in relation to trans- specific jargon. Therefore, it becomes relevant to examine whether the selection of terms in the translated version undermines the solid system of connections that language ensures in the original series. Applying a queer perspective to Audiovisual Translation Studies, and comparing the dialogues in the original and dubbed versions, the aim of this study is to problematise the translational strategies used for the adaptation of trans characters’ speech into Italian, in order to understand their effect on the representation of the community’s kinship.