Reclaiming Rio: Iconization and erasure of American English in the Brazilian Portuguese dubbing of an animated film

Abstract

This article draws on Irvine and Gal’s semiotic processes of iconization and erasure of language differentiation to analyse and compare the English language original and Brazilian Portuguese dubbed version of the animated film Rio. Three scenes depicting cross-linguistic encounters between American English- and Brazilian Portuguese-speaking characters are studied to see how screen translators approach situations in which the linguistic other in a source text is portrayed by a language that coincides with the target language. The case study draws on translational strategies proposed by Zabalbeascoa and Corrius. Viewed from the perspective of semiotic processes of language differentiation, these strategies have a striking effect: whereas mainstream Hollywood films tend to portray multilingual situations and the non-English-speaking linguistic other by iconization and erasure, once the film is dubbed, it is American English identities that are iconized and later disappear from the screen.