Analysing Multilingualism in Drama And Comedy: the Italian Dubbing of Jane The Virgin and Peaky Blinders

The coexistence of different languages, language varieties and accents on screen is observable in a growing number of American as well as European TV series, which have been variously referred to as ‘polyglot’, ‘multilingual’, ‘plurilingual’ and 'heterolingual'. Indeed, scholars in the field of Film Studies as well as Audiovisual Translation Studies have acknowledged a ‘multilingual turn’ or ‘multilingual commitment’ in recent products. This study focuses on the translation of two recent TV series, Jane the Virgin and Peaky Blinders , both characterised by the presence of multilingual dialogues, with the aim of illustrating the ‘transfer options’ adopted for the transmission of multilingual discourse to an Italian audience. Attention will be paid to the functions of multilingualism (using Corrius and Zabalbeascoa taxonomy) in the original versions as well as in the translated versions. The two TV series provide the opportunity to analyse the phenomenon of multilingualism on screen in two different genres: drama and comedy, where linguistic polyphony plays different roles and functions, especially in terms of character portrayal.