| dc.description.abstract | The objective of this master’s thesis is to establish whether, to what extent, and how the Norwegian subtitling of African American Vernacular English (AAVE) has changed between the 1980s and 2020. This diachronic study of translation does not investigate the Norwegian subtitling of AAVE in general, but in relation to a specific set of films and one episode from a TV series from two different time periods, focusing on the translation of five distinct AAVE language features. This investigation is carried out with a coupled pair analysis of translations gathered from dialogue in Purpurfargen (1986), Amerika for mine føtter (1988), Gjør det rette (1989), The Forty-Year-Old Version (2020), Insecure S4 E6: Lowkey Done (2020), and All Day and a Night (2020). The interest in studying developments in Norwegian subtitling of AAVE is related to changes in ideology in mainstream society in recent years, spearheaded by Woke movements like Black Lives Matter spreading awareness on racial injustice and discrimination in the United States (US) and abroad. AAVE constitutes a set of dialects predominantly spoken by working class African Americans residing in urban areas in the United States (US), and as a non-standard variety of English associated with a marginalized group of speakers, AAVE tends to be stigmatized and associated with low levels of prestige. This study proposed a possible link between developments in the translation of a language variety associated with a marginalized racial minority and changes in ideologies of race. The findings generated by this study conclude that the Norwegian subtitling of AAVE has not changed between the 1980s and 2020, with analysed translations from both time periods consistently rendering AAVE language features Standard Norwegian in subtitles. | |