Dubbing teenage speech into Italian: creative translation in Skins.

The members of a speech community can be defined as people who have habitual contact with each other and have developed a shared use of the language, with a common lexicon and language practices. The partly stereotyped speech communities depicted in audiovisual productions offer a wide variety of examples for the researchers’ analysis. Some of the most interesting communities are those of teenagers in a given place and at a given moment in time, as their way of speaking often reflects a specifically local reality and is characterised by creativity and ephemerality. This paper discusses the case study of the comedic teenage drama Skins, a UK production which has been running since 2007, portraying the lives of a group of young people from Bristol. Their lively, dense, rich vocabulary becomes even more imaginative in the hands of the creative adapters responsible for the Italian dubbed version, who have resorted to various strategies to give an exotic feel in Italian to this teenage jargon.