Code-Switching and AAVE in Translation: an analysis of "The Hate U Give" by Angie Thomas

This dissertation focuses on African American Vernacular English (AAVE) and investigates both its linguistic features and the implications of its translation into Italian. Firstly, it examines the origins and development of AAVE, its main grammatical features, and the practice of code-switching between AAVE and Standard English, highlighting AAVE's role in expressing cultural identity. Secondly, it discusses the challenges involved in translating non-standard language varieties and the strategies adopted to render dialects. Finally, the study investigates the use of AAVE in Angie Thomas’s novel “The Hate U Give” and compares it with its Italian translation. The analysis evaluates how AAVE linguistic features, code-switching, and identity markers are transformed, neutralized, or lost in the target language. It also shows how translation strategies influence the representation of characters and their voices, revealing the difficulty of conveying the sociolinguistic dimension of AAVE in translation.