Translating hesitations in film speech: The case of Hugh Grant

The present study aims to investigate the way dysfluencies such as hesitations and pauses of silence are rendered when adapting films from English into Italian, and their impact on characterization. Such features are observed referring to the actor Hugh Grant, known for displaying verbal insecurity stereotypically British (Chiaro 2000; Fox 2004). The study focuses on four romantic comedies: Four Weddings and a Funeral (1994), Notting Hill (1999), Bridget Jones’s Diary (2001) and Love Actually (2003), where the presence of hesitation markers plays an important role in the characterization of the male protagonist, namely a young man, shy, hesitant and a little clumsy. The investigation is carried out through a linguistic and translation-oriented analysis of the original English version and the Italian dubbed version of each title. When possible, a multilingual comparative analysis is also carried out, taking into account the adaptations made for other languages such as French and Spanish in order to identify symmetries and asymmetries between different translation approaches. In dubbing a tendency to reduce hesitations can be noticed, which is partly due to the limits imposed by the audiovisual medium itself (Bruti 2019; Chaume 2012). The analysis shows how possible changes in the adaptations can alter the perception of characters, leading them to a performance that does not correspond to the original one.