(Re)inventing the genre: the translation of the onē kotoba idiolect in the Japanese-Italian subtitling

In the context of interlinguistic subtitling, gender translation may disclose important clues about the way identity-related issues are perceived in a source and in a target language. Despite this, little has been said about the thorny questions that arise when gender issues emerging from Japanese movies need to be translated for non-English target audiences. In order not to strengthen gender stereotypes, this study focuses on Japanese-Italian subtitling and, in particular, on the rendition of the so-called onē kotoba idiolect which is a MF transgender/transex/crossdresser talk characterized by a sarcastic and crude tone and by the use of sexually connotated words that contributes to frequent diageneric shifts and mix between the masculine-feminine registers. According to recent research in the field of AVT, Japanese sociolinguistics and gender studies, the essentialist woman vs. man dualism (cissexism) should be abandoned and replaced with a constructionist framework which treats gender as a complex and fluid cultural construct. Since subtitlers confer identity to their characters through a creative manipulation of linguistic and non-linguistic resources, this preliminary study seeks to illustrate the main interlinguistic difficulties of the onē kotoba subtitling in Italian.