This paper focuses on the subtitling of South Asian diasporic films from English into Italian. These “diasporic films” (Desai, 2004) or “migration films” (Wahl, 2005), such as Bricklane (2007, Sarah Gavron), The Namesake (2006, Mira Nair), Ae fond kiss (2004, Ken Loach), Bend it like Beckham (2002, Gurinder Chadha), East is East (1999, Damien O’Donnell), reflect the recent tendency to represent conditions of migrant and diasporic existence and are characterised by linguistic variation and hybrid forms of language. They display a variety of (socio)linguistic phenomena such as code-switching, code-mixing, varieties of English (marked by a series of lexical, syntactical and prosodic features) or ethnolects spoken by ethnic/cultural groups as a distinguishing mark of social identity, ethnic accents and ethnic connotations performed in the foreign or second language.
Since language variation helps locate the context of culture, the process of subtitling has the difficult task of transmitting pragmatic and cultural content, with all the connotations that may be relevant to characterisation. Therefore, the challenge of rendering hybrid forms of language is added to the problems of translating linguistic elements from one language and culture into another and of shifting from the oral to the written mode.
The aim of the present study is to illustrate how the sociolinguistic connotations (lexical, phonetic and morphosyntactic) of the original dialogues are translated into the Italian subtitles, by showing to what extent translation choices tend towards the normalisation of sub-standard forms and the neutralisation of the phonetic, morphological and syntactic features of sociolinguistic varieties, thus reproducing the so-called “subtitling tone” (Díaz Cintas, 2007). The choice to use a target standard variety to correspond to a non-standard source variety may result from an effort towards greater acceptability and coherence of the target text. However, such a choice may also lead to the partial loss of the “accented” nature of the films (Naficy, 2001).

References
Bayley, R. & Lucas, C. (eds) (2007) Sociolinguistic Variation. Theories, Methods, and Applications. Cambridge University Press.
Desai, J. (2004) Beyond Bollywood: the cultural politics of South Asian diasporic film. New York : Routledge.
Díaz Cintas, J. (2005). "Back to the Future in Subtitling", in MuTra Conference Proceedings
Díaz Cintas, J. & Remael, A. (2007). Audiovisual translation: Subtitling. Manchester, St. Jerome.
Egoyan, A. & Balfour, I. (eds) (2004). Subtitles: on the foreignness of film. Alphabet City Media, MIT Press, Cambridge Mass.
Fought, C. Language and ethnicity. New York: Cambridge University Press, 2006.
Naficy H. (2001). An accented cinema: exilic and diasporic filmmaking. New Jersey: Princeton University Press.

Micòl BESEGHI is currently a PhD student in Comparative Languages and Cultures at the University of Modena and Reggio Emilia (Department of Linguistic Studies on Textuality and Translation, Faculty of Humanities) (Italy). Her research interests include translation teaching with the aid of electronic corpora and audiovisual translation. Her PhD project focuses on translational problems related to the Italian subtitling of a small corpus of Anglo-Indian films characterised by sociolinguistic phenomena and linguistic and cultural hybridity.