This research describes the strategies adopted by dubbing professionals (mainly
translators) in their translations for dubbing of television series, from English into
Italian. More specifically, it means to account for the norms governing the work of
the translators in this field. In order to draw substantial conclusions, the analysis is
conducted on a corpus of television fiction shows, which is not only sufficiently large
but also varied in terms of genre, content, language use, and target audiences.
The main focus of the analysis is the translation of culture specific references; a
subject that has widely been recognised by scholars as being one of the most
problematic translation issues, not only in the case of translation for dubbing but also
in other areas such as literary and drama translation.
One of the hypotheses presented is that the social and historical context in
which dubbing originally came to be in Italy had an impact on its subsequent
evolution and can still be relevant when dealing with issues of censorship and
manipulation of contents.
The methodological foundations of this research rest on Toury’s (1980, 1995)
notion of norms in translation. Toury (1980: 51) considers norms to be central to the
act and the event of translating. The ultimate aim of this study is, therefore, to map
out the strategies activated by translators in response to the cultural environment in
which they operate, and to detect the norms that are prevalent in the case of dubbing
television series into Italian.
The analysis is carried out on a corpus of over 95 hours of television
programmes, whole episodes of three fiction series belonging to different genres:
Friends (sitcom, USA); Life on Mars (science fiction/police procedural drama, UK);
Six Feet Under (drama, USA). All the culture specific elements present in the corpus
have been detected and their adaptation into Italian analysed from a quantitative and
qualitative point of view in order to highlight the prevalent translational behaviours.