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This paper presents an ongoing piece of research on the (re-)production of hybrid cultural and linguistic identities in audiovisual products, and the particulars of their translation process into Spanish.

Our specific interest lies in the subtitling mode, where a considerable amount of constraints like the number of characters available, synchronies, the co-presence of potentially understandable verbal material for the foreign audience, etc., makes the translator’s sociocultural re-working of the source text especially challenging (See González-Iglesias & Toda 2011). In order to explore the implications of this dimension of subtitling, we’ve decided to focus on the audiovisual representation of the so-called Mafia jargon (Scarpino 2010; 2011; Puglisi 2011), used by Italian-American mob bands. Despite their dubious command of Italian, these groups’ constant references to their marginal entourage, at odds with that provided by their high economic status, are often expressed in linguistically-hybrid units of euphemistic nature, mainly related to criminal and unethical attitudes, through the manipulation of a variety of widespread and less known cultural references, both Italian and American. Additionally, their complex hybrid identities interact with further intranational groups of various backgrounds, as well as with other Italian-Americans wishing to escape from any mafia-related prejudices hampering their integration.

For this purpose, our preliminary corpus has been obtained from the HBO original subtitling of the second season (13 episodes) of The Sopranos, an acclaimed HBO series undertaking a considerable update of the traditional portrayal of Italian-American mafia in audiovisual settings (Scarpino 2011). At this preliminary stage, I intend to determine the translation norm (Toury 2012; Delabastita 1989) (or lack thereof) underlying the Spanish subtitles available on the platform.

Extracting and describing the relevant units for our analysis, both in the source and the target texts, requires the consideration of different perspectives. From a grammatical standpoint, we’ll be working with two main types of elements: monolexical units, mainly nouns and adjectives, and plurilexical ones, within which we intend to consider the phraseological typologies included in Alcaraz & Martínez’s classification (2004). From a sociolinguistic perspective, we seek to characterize the translation of a specific ‘Mafia jargon’, whose main purpose, according to Scarpino (2010: 342) ‘(...) has always been to serve as a red herring for the law, FBI’s wiretapping in particular.” Lastly, from a functionalist translation approach, our working units must reflect relevant culturemes, defined by Nord (2014: 137) as “a social phenomenon of a culture A that is regarded as relevant by the members of this culture and, when compared with a corresponding social phenomenon in a culture B, is found to be specific to culture A.”