Identity-building and Language Variation in AVT

When audiovisual texts are translated - whether dubbed or subtitled - although a number of component semiotic modalities necessarily remain unaltered, the linguistic exchanges, and therefore the social relationships they contribute to build, inevitably mutate. Such mutations can, in turn, bring about changes in the identitary makeup of the characters leading to a 'gain' or 'loss' for the target viewers. This paper investigates the manner in which some of the characters present in the American film Eat Pray Love (2010) undergo mutation of the linguistic and cultural identity they are perceived to possess in the original English source version, and thereby come to have instead a number of linguistic and extra-linguistic cultural traits which allow them to take on different, more indigenous, identities when 'crossing over' into the dubbed Italian version.