This America, man. The subtitled translation of AAVE in The Wire.

Abstract

The object of study for this essay is the subtitled translation into Spanish of the African American Vernacular English (AAVE). Several examples taken from the American TV show The Wire are used in order to illustrate our findings. Firstly, we focus on the importance of the dialectal varieties found in the series, namely the AAVE (and the Baltimore native dialect known as Bawlmer);  the relevance they have in the show is so important that the viewer  needs to understand them adequately in order to grasp the essence of the program. Next, we deal theoretically with the manyfold dialectal problems found in The Wire; to illustrate this approach, we use Marco Borillo´s (2002) typology, which will be useful in this study to analyze, and later to translate into Spanish, some AAVE lexical and morphosyntactic features. These features are illustrated with examples of dialogues taken from the first season of The Wire, where we compare the source text with the oficial HBO Spanish translation. All the examples are accompanied with alternative translations, whose aim is to achieve within the translation a similar linguistic tone as the one found in the English version.