Localising Cockney: translating dialect into Italian

The wide field of sociolinguistics and dialectology applied to translation and to AVT in particular is one of the most fertile, lively and creative objects of research today. Audiovisual texts offer a varied and exhaustive number of examples of linguistic variation at phonological, syntactical, and lexical levels. In the case of Italian, the attitude of translators towards linguistic varieties is multi-faceted but is still markedly influenced by the strong emphasis placed, in the foreign language and translation classroom, on the study of Standard English and Received Pronunciation. Examples taken from films of various genres and dubbed in different periods help illustrate some of the strategies which have been used in the past to translate the Cockney variant of English into Italian. The paper also tries to offer the most appropriate solutions that help achieve a pleasant exotic effect without falling into any of the two potential extremes of incoherent localisation or banalising neutralisation.