Analysing multilingualism in drama and comedy: the Italian dubbing of Lion and Demain tout commence

In recent decades, cinema has increasingly included and depicted multilingual realities (Heiss 2014). Starting from a discussion of multilingualism and its main functions on screen, this paper focuses on two multilingual films of recent production and of different genres – the drama Lion (Gareth Davis 2016) and the comedy Demain tout commence (Hugo Gélin 2016) in order to analyse the transfer operations (Zabalbeascoa and Voellmer 2014) found in the Italian dubbed versions. The aim of the study is to investigate how multilingual discourse is dealt with in the translated versions and to consider the implications of different translation strategies in terms of character portrayal and film genre.