The translation of cultural references in the Italian dubbing of television series

Abstract

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.