Bringing The Nanny to the Italian Audience : Dubbing as Adaptation and Assimilation

• 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.

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HUMANIORA  -- Språk och litteratur -- Jämförande språkvetenskap och allmän lingvistik (hsv//swe)

HUMANITIES  -- Languages and Literature -- General Language Studies and Linguistics (hsv//eng)

HUMANIORA  -- Annan humaniora -- Kulturstudier (hsv//swe)

HUMANITIES  -- Other Humanities -- Cultural Studies (hsv//eng)

SAMHÄLLSVETENSKAP  -- Medie- och kommunikationsvetenskap -- Medievetenskap (hsv//swe)

SOCIAL SCIENCES  -- Media and Communications -- Media Studies (hsv//eng)

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Medievetenskap och journalistik

Media Studies and Journalism

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