Yeah, it's clickbait, but don't blame me--you clicked it!
Luca is a fun movie. My kids wanted to watch it three times, and I liked it too. But there's one thing I just can't get past: it uses a secondary language, and it does so badly.
The primary narrative language is... well, it's whatever you happened to watch it in, because Disney does a lot of translations, but I watched it in English. However, the story is set in Italy, and it uses Italian as a secondary language which the audience is not required to understand in order to better develop that setting, with the appearance of a standard translation convention to make the intrafictionally-Italian-speaking characters comprehensible to the English-speaking audience. This is essentially the same situation we find Kill the Beast with respect to French. The characters are "really" speaking the secondary language, but we hear it (or read it) as English except for occasional instances where the "real" language is exposed to remind us that a conventional translation is happening.
Despite being a film rather than a book, Luca even uses exactly the expected techniques for linguistic worldbuilding, in line with my previous typology: every instance of Italian in the English version of the film (both spoken and in in-world writing) is either an instance of Make It Obvious (primarily used in the case of "what's wrong with you, stupido"), Make It Irrelevant, or Make It an Easter Egg (with one ambiguous case of narrative translation, when Luca sees the Vespa poster and says "freedom", which may or may not be him reading off the Italian text). If you happen to know that all of Giulia's expletives are references to cheese, that's fun, but if you don't understand a single word of Italian besides stupido, you're not missing anything important--you're just being subtly reminded of the setting. And you even get explicit acknowledgment that understanding the Italian is unimportant, because this is a movie, and they could have actually subtitled it--but the Italian is never translated in the subtitles.
But, all this work is ruined by the fact that the translation convention is inconsistent. Just consider: do the sea monsters speak Italian? Clearly, they speak the same language as the humans, as no sea monsters have any trouble communicating and blending in with humans once they come onto land. However, the sea monsters never speak spontaneous Italian. Only humans are allowed to have their underlying Italian revealed. Sea monsters only ever quote Italian words, and are consistently shown as not understanding it; e.g., Luca and Alberto clearly don't know what stupido means (although Luca quickly picks up that it's actually something bad), nor do they understand Alberto's catchphrase "Piacere, Girolamo Trombetta." ("Pleased to meet you, Twisty Trombone").
But if the sea monsters don't speak Italian... are we really supposed to believe that all of these mid-century small-town Italians are just consistently speaking Italian-accented English as their primary language amongst themselves are occasionally throwing in Italian phrases for spice intrafictionally? I find that... implausible.
So, Luca and language? Excellent example of what not to do.
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I think you're missing the possibility that all mid-century small-town Italians speak sea monster.
ReplyDeleteThat seems sociolinguistically implausible, as sea monster is clearly a basilect.
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