Pell, Gregory. Review of: "Balma, Philip and Giovanni Spani, eds. TRANSLATING FOR (AND FROM) THE ITALIAN SCREEN: DUBBING AND SUBTITLES. New York: Bordighera, 2020." in ITALICA 97.4 (2020): 929-933. (original) (raw)

Italian dialetti in audiovisual translation: perspectives on three quality TV series

Ragusa e Montalbano: voci del territorio in traduzione audiovisiva a cura di Massimo Sturiale, Giuseppe Traina, Maurizio Zignale, 2019

Italian dialetti in audiovisual translation: perspectives on three quality TV series by Silvia Bruti & Irene Ranzato In this contribution we have decided to investigate into the translating strategies of famous and successful Italian productions that are strongly characterised by the use of dialect. If on the one hand dialect lends narratives an undisputed quality of authenticity, although, as shall be seen, it is always a crafted representation in which specific traits have been chosen, its presence makes translation into a target language and culture quite challenging. In particular, apart from focusing on Il Commissario Montalbano (Camilleri 1999-in production), the theme of the conference from which this chapter stems (Ragusa e Montalbano: voci del territorio in traduzione audiovisiva 2017), we meant to include other Italian productions that have in recent times been considered quality productions and have been profitably exported abroad such as Romanzo criminale (Sollima 2008-2010) and Gomorra (Saviano 2014-in production). These two series, together with Il Commissario Montalbano and 1992 (Accorsi 2015), have been recognised as an undisputed success abroad (Pallante 2017), but the three we have selected for this investigation share interesting narrative and stylistic features.

Speaking in Subtitles: Revaluing Screen Translation

Edinburgh University Press, 2017

With over 6000 languages in the world today, media speak is far from universal, yet the complexities of translation are rarely acknowledged by the industry, or by audiences and scholars. Redressing this neglect, Speaking in Subtitles argues that the oddities and idiosyncrasies of translation are vital to screen media’s global storytelling. Examining a range of examples from crowdsourced subtitling to avant-garde dubbing to the growing field of ‘fansubbing’, Tessa Dwyer proposes that film, television and video are fundamentally ‘translational' media. Topics include: Censorship Media piracy Amateurism Fansubbing (fan subtitling) Crowdsourcing Case Studies include: The Invisible Cinema, New York (1970-74) and Viki Global TV (www.viki.com)

The changing face of audiovisual translation in Italy

Even though audiovisual translation currently involves the use of new modes, such as audiodescription and audiosubtitling, the two most common forms of screen translation still remain dubbing and subtitling. Italy is traditionally a dubbing country. Audiovisual products started to be dubbed in Italy in the 1930s, as a consequence of a Fascist law which forbade the use of any foreign word. Since then, the practice of dubbing has become so deeply rooted in Italian culture that the dubbing industry has developed into an extremely active and profitable business. The practice of audiovisual translation has obviously undergone considerable changes during the years, and it is continuing to evolve. Specifically, such changes are observable both at a diatopic and at a diaphasic and diastratic level, and they reflect the effort on the part of the dubbing professionals to make the language spoken in dubbed films as similar as possible to spontaneous spoken Italian.

Images Translating Images: “Dubbing” Text on Screen (2013)

Film is a combination of many signifying codes, broadly classified as visual or acoustic. 1 Although the specificity of film lies in the interaction of these multiple codes, some of them are, in practice, more equal than others. Film scholars and cinephiles have traditionally privileged the visual over the acoustic; it is well known, for instance, that Henri Langlois exhibited prints of films at the Cinémathèque française without translation. By contrast, scholars of translation are most interested in film dialogue, and so modes of audiovisual translation tend to be defined in terms of how they treat dialogue: subtitling translates dialogue by superimposing written translations of the dialogue on screen; dubbing replaces the dialogue track with a re-recorded dialogue track in the target language; voiceover overlays a new dialogue track on the old one, usually spoken by one, or at most two, speakers.