Direct Anglicisms in dubbed Italian. A preliminary study on animated films

The aim of this article is to investigate the presence of direct English borrowings in dubbed Italian, focusing in particular on a genre that has received little scholarly attention so far, i.e., animated films. The article takes as a sample eight American animated films released between 2010 and 2015 and produced by Disney, Disney Pixar, Dreamworks, Sony Pictures and 20th Century Fox. By examining the English and Italian transcriptions of the dialogues and analysing each film several times, the article attempts to understand whether there exist any recurring patterns or norms regarding the presence of English words in dubbed dialogues. A list of direct Anglicisms occurring in the dubbed dialogues is provided and preliminary observations on the quantity and quality of the Anglicisms are made, taking into account the corpus as a whole but also each film individually. The preliminary results seem to suggest that no regulations or rules exist and that the number and type of Anglicisms in dubbed animated films depend on setting, plot and character. Moreover, most of the Anglicisms found in the sample are attested in Italian monolingual dictionaries, with very few exceptions. In terms of quantity and distribution, the only words which occur in most of the films and whose frequency is quite high are the interjections okay and wow, that is, two pragmatic Anglicisms.