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Bringing The Nanny to the Italian Audience: Dubbing as Adaptation and Assimilation
(IMS)ORCID iD: 0000-0002-7607-399x
2017 (English)In: First conference of the Journal for Italian Cinema and Media Studies, American University of Rome, Italy, 9-10 June 2017, 2017Conference paper, Oral presentation with published abstract (Other academic)
Sustainable development
Not refering to any SDG
Abstract [en]

As widely known in Translation Studies, no translation comes without adaptation: translating means converting a source-language text into a target-language text bearing in mind that the cultural context of the target language is likely to be different. Adaptation is typically at work with those puns, proverbs or idiomatic expressions that are not translatable verbatim and thus require some semantic adaptation that should convey the same meaning under a different form – e.g. the meaning of the English “Touch wood!” is rendered in Italian by “Tocca ferro! [Touch iron]”

Dubbing is a popular method of audio-visual translation – or better, of audio-visual adaptation – and the preferred one in such non-English-speaking countries as France, Germany and Italy. The major problem with dubbing is that, unlike subtitling, it replaces part of the film: the dialogue track. An audio-visual product can thus undergo radical and even utterly arbitrary adaptation operations without the audience in the target country noticing it, given the unavailability of the original dialogue track for comparison. Dubbing, more than subtitling, often imposes on the audio-visual product a more or less marked process of socio-cultural “assimilation” – in its original meaning of “making similar.” Through significant changes in the dialogue, the audio-visual work is adapted to make it more relatable to the target audience. In some cases, this assimilation leads to a radical modification of the original socio-cultural context of the work, an extreme “assimilating” adaptation that is often unnecessary semantically – a more faithful translation of the dialogue could have been perfectly understandable even without such drastic changes. In these cases the rationale is market-oriented: the audience may enjoy the audio-visual work better if they recognise in the story familiar elements and a world that is “similar” to theirs.

The case study presented is the Italian version of the American TV series The Nanny (1993-1999) in which the Jewish characters were turned into Italian characters. This created incongruous formal consequences – e.g. mismatches between the new dialogue track and the original visual track – but assured a wide success on the Italian television.

Place, publisher, year, edition, pages
2017.
National Category
General Language Studies and Linguistics Cultural Studies Media and Communication Studies
Research subject
Media Studies and Journalism
Identifiers
URN: urn:nbn:se:lnu:diva-101972OAI: oai:DiVA.org:lnu-101972DiVA, id: diva2:1542457
Conference
First conference of the Journal for Italian Cinema and Media Studies, American University of Rome, Italy, 9-10 June 2017
Note

Ej belagd 210409

Available from: 2021-04-07 Created: 2021-04-07 Last updated: 2025-02-11Bibliographically approved

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Audissino, Emilio

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CiteExportLink to record
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Citation style
  • apa
  • ieee
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  • vancouver
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Language
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  • nn-NB
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  • Other locale
More languages
Output format
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  • asciidoc
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