Dubbese - doppiaggese PDF

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Dubbing in Italy: the issue of Dubbese Over the last few decades, the development of television and film industry led international markets to deal ever more frequently with the overcoming of cultural and linguistic differences between the source country of the product and the target one. Since cinema and television are the most widely enjoyed media among the population, the amount of works to adapt to different cultural and linguistic realities is constantly increasing. The rapid technological development has allowed audiovisual translation (AVT) to consolidate and expand, making it nowadays one of the most dynamic fields in translation. This essay aims to describe the landscape of AVT in Italy from a linguistic point of view, focusing on the issues deriving from translation of foreign cinema and television. It will do so by firstly giving a general overview on the tendencies of AVT in the country, and then facing and analyzing translation difficulties and the phenomenon of dubbese. AVT concerns the transfer of audiovisual texts either interlingually or intralingually, i.e. the translation of products using both the acoustic channel, in which are included words, the soundtrack and special effects, and the visual channel, which comprises images, colors, movement etc. By integrating the information transmitted by the two channels, the viewer is able to reconstruct the contents and to correctly interpret the plot. This multi-semiotic feature of AVT products also affects the translators, who should be able to recreate dialogues emulating spontaneous mode of discourse, which also include some non-verbal codes of meaning, and at the same time they need to comply with time and space limitations (Chaume 2013). The translator must, in other words, try to achieve an adequate semiotic balance between verbal and gestural language, in order to avoid conflict and not to underestimate either of them.

There are various modes of translation in ATV, the most frequently used being dubbing, voiceover and subtitling. Even if nowadays it is risky to classify countries on the base of their translating tendencies, Italy is generally labelled as a dubbing country. In fact, although nowadays subtitling has become a universal AVT method in the European scenery and Italy is more open to subtitles than it used to be, its most widespread of audiovisual translation is still dubbing (Perego et al. 2016). Dubbing is a form of revoicing which consists of substituting the original soundtrack of a product with a new soundtrack translated in the target language, lip-syncing the script (Chaume 2013). The difficulties of the translator, however, are not limited to make lip movement coincide with the new dialogues; from a linguistical point of view, the translator needs to adapt the translations to the visual sphere, to translate wordplays, to vehiculate correctly the humor of the source script, to transpose in an adequate manner obscene language, to reproduce salient sociolinguistic variables, such as regional accents or dialects. Because of its structure, dubbing language could be considered relatively different from real language. It is, in fact, a pre-wrote and then played text, and consequently, non spontaneous and subject to different procedures such as editing and post-synchronization. The Italian language of television and cinema falls within the broader category of Italian transmitted through a medium (television, radio, phone, text messages, chat, e-mail) and it has a spoken nature, even if it is at first mainly written to be then read out. For this reason, the typical elements of written text are mixed with those typical of the spoken discourse, which tend, however, to create a prefabricated and considerably artificial effect. (D’Achille 2003). The birth and spreading of cinema, television and other means of transmission at distance played historically a key role in Italy, since they facilitated the unification process of the use of spoken language, which, undoubtedly, would otherwise have been more difficult (D’Achille 2003). This

applies not only to original Italian cinema, but also to foreign films, since they were always consumed by the audience through dubbing, i.e. in spoken Italian, and not through subtitles. The latter were in fact avoided because of the high levels of illiteracy of the population. Sound film, since its earliest days in the 1930’s, when the majority of the population was still speaking only dialect, acted as an important vehicle of Italian language for all sections of society, but its influence on our linguistic habits is still an actual fact. (D’Achille 2003). If it is true that it is by listening to others that we learn our native language (Saussure 1983), it should also be considered that television has its responsibilities when it comes to conveying bad habits (Simone 1991). Since the 1980’s, the introduction in the film and television industry of a substantial amount of foreign products to dub, and the emergence of many improvised adapters and translators caused a decrease in the quality of dubbing language, which is also due to the forced working pace and the need to limit costs. Over time dubbing language has undergone significant changes. The term coined by Italian linguists to negatively and satirically connotate this artificial use of English is dubbese (in Italian doppiaggese). This hybrid form of Italian “contaminated” not only the entire language of Italian cinema, but also, as stated before, the everyday written and spoken Italian: this is due first of all to the significant number of calques used by the adaptors, to the flattening of varieties and to the impression of artificial formality, according to which any character, regardless of the social class to which they belong, speak with no difference and without any dialect inflection. In this way, people are not able to feel any difference between, for example, an American street gang man and a lawyer; their accent, language and use of vocabulary would be exactly the same. (Antonini 2008). However, it should be said that this flattening of language is not an exclusive issue of dubbese, since it also represents a current tendency in original Italian TV: banal vocabulary, rough syntax and a general linguistic impoverishment are the everyday scenario. (Simone 1991).

The phenomenon of calques is the most widespread and evident in dubbese. this aspet can be especially seen in American English dubbed works: : also because of the need to lip-sync American English, characterized by often short words and slang, different calques gradually spread, e.g. ‘amico’ for ‘buddy’, exclamations like ‘dannazione!’ or expression such as ‘dacci un taglio’ from the English ‘cut it out’, or ‘ci puoi scommettere’ for ‘you bet’, that should be better translated in the target language with expressions such as ‘senza dubbio’ e ‘finiscila’. Another feature that can be easily noticed in dubbing language is the use of personal pronouns and possessive adjectives, which are needed in the English language, but absolutely heavy and redundant in Italian. Also, obscene expression such as “fottuto” and “dannato”, which resemble the original ones, sound incredibly artificial. The introduction of these terms is due in particular to lip-sync matters and let us immediately understand the American origin of the product; these terms are now part of the everyday language of Italian media and are utilized especially by the younger population, i.e. the ones who are more in contact with foreign cinema and TV works. Lastly, it is also evident that the function of dubbed cinema as a propulsor of anglicisms: this is the case of words like coroner or dete4ctive in noir-detective products, which are no more translated with the Italian equivalent medico legale or investigatore. The huge technological developments in the audiovisual sector (digital television, dvds) have made available a wide array of services that can aid the viewers in recovering whatever they miss in whatever version they choose to watch a filmic product....