The aimof this paper is to investigate how Italian subtitlers cope with the translation of
a non British or American variety of English among the many ‘New Englishes’ in the
world; in this case ‘Jamaican English’, or rather, the language spoken on the island of
Jamaica which is mainly Jamaican Creole. Examples are provided from the recently
restored DVD version (2006) of the 1972 filmThe Harder They Come. The author focuses
in particular on exploring cultural aspects as well as generic indicators to determine to
what extent Jamaican values and cultural identity traits are linguistically and visually
transferred through speech and song (reggae) to an Italian audience. Detail of research
methodology is reported with exemplification of translation strategies taken from the
discourses in amultimodal conceptual framework.
