Language Ideologies and Gender Stereotypes: Representation of Adult Masculine Speech in the Japanese Dub of the American Series "Never Have I Ever"

This chapter presents the continuation of my study into the speech of young adults of the American series Never Have I Ever (2020) in its Japanese subtitled and dubbed version (Vitucci, 2023). It illustrates how translations reproduce and naturalise the dominant gendered and nation- alised ideologies of a target-language society through the so-called ‘strat- egy of transduction’ (Inoue, 2003). Transduction refers to a relation where a certain indexical order from a source language is transposed tout court into the target language through some relevant equivalences. Through this practice, language can be exploited to suggest the presumed member- ship of certain virtual locutors to specific identities, classes or social groups. Regarding the relationship between identity and language prac- tice, SturtzSreetharan (2009) suggests that linguistic practices cannot simply be predicted or predicated on standard (or dominant) language ideologies. The concept of language ideologies (Duranti, 2021) proves to be important also for this study since it is intrinsically linked to the ide- ologies of communication and the related metapragmatic stereotypes produced by the so-called iconisation process, which associates a specific group of speakers with precise linguistic characteristics (Irvine & Gal, 2000; Spitzmüller, 2022).