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Audiovisual translation is a branch of translation studies concerned with the transfer of multimodal and multimedial texts into another language or culture. On the one hand, audiovisual texts are defined multimodal because their production and interpretation rely on the combined use of different semiotic resources or modes (i.e. language, images, music). On the other, it is defined multimedial since the semiotic modes are delivered by means of various medias in a synchronised manner.
Audiovisual translation is a special and interesting type of translation, because film scripts are special types of texts which trace the dialogue taking place between the characters, so they are written to be performed (moreover, it is the only element that can be completely replaced in dubbing). As a consequence, they have two modes of existence: as texts and as performances (Fabb, 1997: 221). Taylor defines film scripts as pertaining to the genre labelled as to be spoken as if not written. i.e. “a complex semiotic event” in as much as it creates meaning by means of gestures words, sounds, music and pictures (Taylor, 1999: 265).
The contrast between spoken and written language has long been analysed by linguists who have identified a series of differences between spontaneous speech and written language.
One of the approaches to the study of conversation, derived from Ethnomethodology1 is conversational analysis. It generally attempts to describe the orderliness, structure and sequential patterns of interaction, whether this is institutional or casual conversation. In fact, the expression “conversation” may be misleading, if read in a colloquial sense, therefore Emanuel Schegloff, one of the most important conversational analysts, prefers to use the expression “talk–in-interaction”. Some other linguists, who use the methodology of conversational analysis, identify themselves as discourse analysts (though that term was first used to identify researchers using methods different from conversational analysis (Levinson, 1983), and still identifies a group of scholars larger than those who use only conversational analysis methods. Conversational analysis was developed in the late 1960s and early 1970s, principally by the sociologists Harvey Sacks, Emanuel Schegloff and Gail Jefferson. Nowadays, conversational analysis has become an established methodology in sociology, anthropology, linguistics, speech-communication and psychology. It is particularly influential in interactional sociolinguistics, discourse analysis and discursive psychology. Recently, techniques of sequential analysis have also been employed by phoneticians to explore the fine phonetic details of speech.
First of all, spoken language is context dependent, which signifies that meaning depends on context, because it entails what speakers know about what they can see about them (situational meaning), their background knowledge, i.e. what they know about each other and the world, and what they know about what they have been saying (context). Discourse analysis (among many, see Harris, 1952; Grumperz and Hymes 1964; Labov 1972; Sinclair and Coulthard 1975, Halliday, 1989; McCarthy and Carte, 1994) emphasises the importance of context claiming that all interactions take place in a particular context involving specific participants and circumstances, which influence the register of the conversation (language varies according to the functions it serves on the basis of a concept of appropriateness. Thus, the analysis of context of situation may lead to the identification of language registers (each register has its own set of characteristics, i.e. information organization, choice of vocabulary, phonological
1 a sociological discipline which examines how people make sense of their world, display this understanding to others, and produce the mutually shared social order in which they live. The term was initially coined by Harold Garfinkel in the 1960s
features). Active or passive knowledge of context allows participants to understand part of the conversation which otherwise would appear disconnected. Instead, written texts are not closely linked to the context in which they are produced and they can be read and interpreted in different contexts, because there is always a temporal gap between production and reception of the written text.
Spontaneous speech is realised in real time and it is not planned like written language. As a consequence, speakers stitch together elements drawn from previous discourse or add language as they go on (actually, spoken language is defined additive or rhapsodic), since they do not have to plan what they are going to say, whereas, writers have time to plan what they are going to write and can revise it afterwards. As a consequence, the vocabulary of writers is more varied than the vocabulary used by speakers, since they have to choose words in a short time. As Taylor points out, spoken language is more a process than a product, since it can be modified in midstream (2001: 249).
This creates some performance phenomena, such as dysfluencies, hesitations, repairs, false starts and reformulation. Dysfluencies are minor performance problems that do not interfere with understanding, while hesitations are pauses and signal that the speaker has not finished his/her turn and discourages another speaker from taking the floor. These phenomena are due to the pressure of real-time production, because speakers are subject to the limitations of short-term memory and they have little time to plan their speech.
Moreover, speakers are never sure whether the listener is paying attention, so they tend to repeat the content of their message by means of repetitions, paraphrases and restatements. Thus speakers show the conversational cooperation in the construction of their turns, but without organizing their speech hierarchically. Actually, conversation has a rigid structure, that is the turn-taking system, i.e. the rules that people follow to take or give a turn during a conversation (Sacks, Schegloff and Jefferson, 1974). Conversation is the result of combined efforts, which imply a minimum level of cooperation between the speakers (Grice, 1967).
It is possible to affirm that conversation is not completely spontaneous and unplanned, thus, it is possible to study it. Conversation is made both of elements which are rather
standardised, i.e. routines (Aijmer, 1996 and Coulmas, 1981) and terms of address, and elements which are unplanned and thus completely spontaneous, i.e. inserts, interjections, exclamatory words and hesitators.
Discourse markers are words or phrases that function primarily as a structuring unit of spoken language. They signal a transition in the ongoing conversation or an interactive relationship between speaker, hearer and message. Discourse markers are active contributions to the discourse and signal such activities as change in speaker, taking or holding control of the floor, relinquishing control of the floor, or the beginning of a new topic, i.e. I see, you know, well, yeah, are elements which are partly planned and partly unplanned, since they help the speaker structure his discourse, but they are uttered quite unconsciously (Blakemore, 1987).
Especially in face-to-face conversation, speakers do not bother to encode all the information, because it can be understood from the linguistic or situational context, thus ellipsis is a frequent phenomenon. Ellipsis is a form of syntactic reduction, that implies the omission or deletion of some items of the surface text, which are however recoverable in terms of relation with the text itself.
Another way of recovering information is by means of question tags, which constitute another feature typical of spoken discourse. For question tags prosody is very important, because it is on the basis of their intonational contour that the listener is able to understand the meaning of the question tag itself.
In fact, in spontaneous language meaning is not conveyed only by what is said, but also by body language and prosodic features. For example, if the speaker is saying something embarrassing he is likely to blush and not to look his addressee in the eye. This means that in order to produce and understand spoken discourse, the speakers’ knowledge has to go beyond the awareness of the meaning of words. This seems to happen without any particular training in the rules of conversation.
The dynamicity of spoken language is also due to syntactic features: speakers tend to use simpler sentences that are more verb oriented and use less nominalization. On the contrary, written language is more lexically dense, i.e. it has more content words
(moreover, low-frequency items are more frequent), even if it is less grammatically intricate, because it has an organised clause structure. In particular, written language shows a high proportion of hypotaxis and nominalization, which means that information is conveyed by complex noun groups (Taylor, 2001).
Moreover, the use of the passive voice and impersonal constructions is more frequent in written language than in speech. This is due to the fact that spoken discourse carries interpersonal meanings related to the status, attitudes, roles, relationships and emotions of the speakers. On the one hand, written language does not imply any interaction with the addressee, on the other, in spoken language, the addressee is usually present and interacts with the speaker. Actually, Biber et al. point out that the aim of conversation is “to express personal feelings, to establish, reaffirm or maintain interpersonal relationships” (1998).
Writing and speaking can be defined as two different modes of communication as they are two different ways of expressing linguistic meanings. However, speaking and writing are not just two alternative ways of saying something, rather, they are ways of doing different things in order to achieve different goals. It is rather like the principle that what is said in one human language can also be said in any other, but it is also true that each language has evolved in its own culture, so not all languages are equipped to serve the needs of every culture. Likewise, there is an analogy with speech and writing, that is to say that the former is not always able to express the same meaning that the latter is able to express, and vice versa. This is due to the substantial differences between the written and the spoken language (Halliday, 1985).
As Biber et al point out, there is no single boundary dividing all spoken text from all written texts, so it is more correct to speak of different genres, such as conversation, news broadcasts and academic texts. As a consequence differences between spoken and written text are not a matter of mode, because, for example, we may have an informal letter, which is a written text with oral features, or an academic lecture, which is a spoken text with literate features. This means that the difference between the oral and the written language lies in the concept of “planned” or “unplanned” production of speech and writing (Biber et al, 1999). Planned production includes speech based on writing, such as lecturing, giving a sermon or uttering a prepared speech. Unplanned
production includes conversation, extempore narration and impromptu discussion, but also writing activities such as composing personal emails or personal letters.
In audiovisual translation, the source text, that is the script, can be defined as a sort of planned production, which tries to imitate speech, i.e. an unplanned production. This means that the translator needs to recreate a text which seems unplanned in the language into which he is translating. Linguistic realism is fundamental since it contributes to create the illusion of reality necessary to the success of the film.
Film language has become more and more similar to spontaneous language, thanks, on the one hand, to the insights about conversation that allow scriptwriters to create plausible dialogues, on the other, to the improvement of acting techniques. In order to create a plausible dialogue, scriptwriters have to bear in mind different factors that underlie the dynamics of conversation. They have to take into consideration the level of intimacy of the participants in the exchange and the type of relationship between them, which will help to recreate the power dynamics. Moreover, each speaker has his own style, i.e. some speakers speak more than others, some have a central role in the exchange or they show particular features, i.e. some ask more questions, or use more question tags.
Nevertheless, there are still some differences between spontaneous dialogues and film dialogues, not only because film dialogues are not really spontaneous, but try to imitate speech, but also because they have different aims. On the one hand, the basic aim of spontaneous conversion is to create and maintain social cohesion. On the other, the aims of film dialogues are closely linked to the narrative of the film itself. In fact, they are meant to carry on the plot, to supply the facts to the audience and the relationship between these facts, supply the episode themes in the case of TV series, describe the characters and their relationships with each other and provide a source of humour (Romero-Fresco, 2009: 47).
Therefore, while ordinary speech is often banal and shows a high proportion of formulae and interpersonal factors (i.e. phatic devices), film dialogue is more pertinent to facts related to the story the film is telling, also due to the constraints which usually do not affect spontaneous conversation.
Another factor which makes film dialogue different from spontaneous conversation is the fact that it is conceived to heard by an audience who cannot interact with the participants in the exchange, so they cannot ask questions in case of misunderstanding. Pavesi (2005: 31) underlines that film dialogue differs from spontaneous dialogue in that it is not only bidirectional (i.e. it is carried out between the characters) but it also overlaps with the indirect and unidirectional communication between actors and spectators.
As a consequence in order to be clearly understood by the audience, film language tends to be more comprehensible, thus turns are clearly separated one from another, while in natural speech they tend to overlap giving the impression that people are speaking at the same time (in film language vague language tends to be rare, since it impairs the understanding of the audience who cannot ask for clarification (Quaglio, 2009: 30)). Moreover, real conversation is made of different subtopics or even of different topics, since it is an ongoing process which is built by the speakers in real time. Instead, film dialogue focuses on one main topic at a time, due to time constraints, in order not to confuse the audience.
The history of audiovisual translation began during the era of silent films. In fact, since the beginning of the Twentieth century exporting film involved the translation of the written language incorporated in film, i.e. the intertitles, which were written texts placed between film frames to situate the action spatially and temporally. The translation process consisted in replacing the original intertitles with texts written in the target language.
The advent of sound in the 1920s temporarily stopped the exportation of film from America, because the translating process had become more difficult and new forms of audiovisual translation were needed. In order to overcome this problem, in the late 1920s, an evolved version of the intertitles was used to provide a translation of the source dialogue in synchrony with the relevant fragment of speech(as in silent films), foreshadowing the use of subtitles but the audience did not appreciate this step back. Later, another solution was worked out: the same film was shot in different languages with different actors (i.e. The Lady Lies by H. Henley, which was also shot in Italian, French, Spanish, German and Swedish), but this technique was too expensive.
Thanks to the technological improvements of the second half of the 1920s post-synchronized revoicing made it possible to replace the source dialogue with a different version, but it was not until the Thirties that this technique began to be used to make films available in different languages. The first dubbing studio in Italy was founded in 1932 in Rome and was directed by Mario Almirante (Rossi, 2006).
In Italy, the history of dubbing has been strongly influenced by the political history of the country. Censorship has been applied since the earliest years of the history of films, during Giolitti’s government. In this period, the government could decide whether to authorise or ban films on the basis of ethic and political criteria. The fascist era was the most restrictive period during which all imported films had to be dubbed in Italy. As a consequence, the government could control most of the contents of the films and it could remove all the regionalism and dialect contained in the dialogues in order to obtain a “purer” Italian and promote the national identity.
As Brunetta (1997: 12-13) claims, it is thanks to the cinema and particularly to dubbed films that a certain standard of Italian became common to the majority of the population. Actually, when spoken films started to be projected in Italy, one fifth of the Italian population was illiterate and could only speak dialect, since there was no available reference point for a more standard type of language.
According to a survey (ISTAT, 1959), 64,9% of the population went to the cinema in the post war period and 80% of the population over twelve years old listened to the
radio or watched television. The spread of filmic Italian strongly influenced the development of the Italian language and persuaded the population that the dialects were provincial and old forms of language (De Mauro, 1991:124). Dubbed Italian did not change until the Seventies when dialects began to be used in America dubbed films, i.e.
Il Padrino (Raffaelli, 1997).
As is evident from what was previously stated, there are two main forms of audiovisual translation. i.e. dubbing and subtitling.
Dubbing, or post-synchronized revoicing, consists in the re-recording of the original voice track in the target language using dubbing actors’ voices. The dubbed dialogue aims to recreate the dynamics of the original dialogue, particularly in terms of delivery pace and lip synchronism.
Subtitling consists in the production of fragments of written text (i.e. subtitles) which are superimposed on visual footage while the audiovisual text is played. Since subtitling entails a shift from a spoken to a written medium, this type of audiovisual translation is defined diasemiotic or intermodal (Gottlieb, 1997). Subtitles provide the audience with a rendition of the source text either in their own language, and they are called bilingual or interlinguistic subtitles, or in the source language and they are called interlingual subtitles. Since the fragment of text must be delivered in synchrony with the spoken text and people talk much faster that they read, subtitles inevitably involve some reductions. Nowadays, both methods are widespread and the choice between subtitling and dubbing depends on the culture of the receiving country. European countries can be divided into four groups on the basis of their attitude towards the translation of audiovisual products:
1. Dubbing countries: Italy, Germany, France and Spain;
3. Countries using both dubbing and subtitling: Czech Republic, Slovakia and Hungary;
4. Countries using other types of audiovisual translation: Poland, Lithuania and Estonia (Luyken, 1991)
Actually, Italy has one of the most sophisticated dubbing schools in Europe and as a result the literary style characterising early dubbing has recently become a more realistic and naturally occurring language, although there is still evidence of instances of unnatural and unlikely to occur expressions (Perego and Taylor, 2009: 63).
Research in audiovisual translation began in late 50s and early 60s, but it is not till recently that linguists focused their attention on this branch of studies (Diaz-Cintas, 2009).
The first studies in this field were not proper linguistic analyses, rather they concerned a wide range of subjects related to audiovisual products and were published not in linguistic journals but in cinema and translation journals, newspapers and magazines. Consequently, as much of the early research is not easily retrievable scholars worked on the same topics without knowing what others had already done.
At first, scholars seemed to concentrate more on subtitling rather than on dubbing, in fact, the first published studies on audiovisual topics were Le sous-titrage des films that was published by Lak in 1957 and Les sous-titres… un mal nécessaire, published in 1980 by Marleau.
During the 1960s and 1970s, the interest shifted to dubbing, however, scholars adopted a professional perspective, that is, they concentrated on technical issues such as the role of the audiovisual translator, the stages of the translating process and the difference between dubbing and subtitling, and only minor articles were published.
The event that marked the rise of the interest in audiovisual translation is the first
Conference on Dubbing and Subtitling which was held in Stockholm in 1987 and was
supported by the European Broadcasting Union (EBU)2. The perspective on audiovisual translation changed from a professional point of view to a more descriptive one, which is exemplified by Delabatista’s work (1990) where he highlighted the multisemiotic nature of audiovisual text and its implications in the process of dubbing and subtitling. In fact, the 1990s represent the golden age of audiovisual studies, when the field became the object of a more systematic interest and a translational perspective was adopted. Audiovisual translation is finally considered an autonomous discipline rather than a subgroup of other disciplines. In fact, Diaz-Cintas underlines that audiovisual translation is not to be seen as a genre, but as a text type that includes different text types (i.e. films, TV series) ( 2009).
The terminology used to refer to this particular type of translation was at first variable. The expression film translation was used when television was still not very popular and linguists concentrated on film dialogues. More recently, the expression screen
translation was introduced to shift the focus on the different means of distribution, i.e.
the screen of television, cinema or the computer. On the contrary, the expression
language transfer highlights the verbal component of the audiovisual product, but it
neglects the fact that this component is integrated with non verbal elements such as sounds and images. Even if only dialogues are in fact translated, all semiotic elements are important and have to be taken into account during the translation process, so the expression audiovisual translation seems to be the most suitable for this type of translation in that it refers to the multisemiotic nature of television and cinematographic products (Perego, 2005).
2 The European Broadcasting Union is an association of national broadcasters which aims to promote cooperation between broadcasters and facilitate the exchange of audiovisual content.
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Film dialogue translation is a complex and crucial process, not only because dialogues are the only translatable elements in a film, but also because the plot is almost always built around the dialogues. Moreover, the conversations contribute to the psychological portrayal of the characters (also defining their social background and geographic origin) and to the development of the relationships between the characters (Pavesi, 2005).
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The difficulties of translating film dialogues are those of translation in general, due to the necessity of mediating between source and target language and culture, but there are some more specific issues to be taken into account.
One of the major issues derives from the technical constraints of dubbing,. Even if translation is only one aspect of the process involved in dubbing, nonetheless it is a crucial one. Dubbing aims to transpose the verbal information contained in the original dialogue in agreement with the visuals and other codes. In fact, in dubbing, the translated text does not only have to deal with textual and lexical complexity, but also with the fact that is has to respect the constraints of the filmic text. This means that the text needs to match the speaker’s facial expression, gestures, actions and movements. In fact, Jakobson (1963) was the first to employ the term intersemiotic translation to indicate the interpretation of linguistic signs by means of non-linguistic signs. Since the mid-nineties, this term has been used in the context of audiovisual translation to emphasise the relationship between linguistic and non-linguistic elements in audiovisual productions. Images can facilitate the understanding of a text and help the translator, however, the various semiotic systems used in media communication (i.e. gestures, facial expressions, filmic conventions and image symbolisms) are not universal. Consequently, two sources of difficulties in audiovisual translation arise:
a. the different cultural conventions attributing meaning to non-verbal signs;
b. the different cognitive backgrounds of the receivers of the original and translated text.
(Tomaskievicz, 2009: 21)
The most relevant constraint of dubbing is represented by the various types of synchronism it entails:
a) Lip synchronism (lip-synch); b) Linear synchronism;
c) Gestural synchronism; d) Rhythmic synchronism.
The first three types of synchronism are defined as visual or optical since they refer to the synchrony between what we hear and what we see and they are crucial especially in close up scenes where the lips of actors can be seen.
Lip and linear synchronism are linked to each other: on the one hand, lip synch means that the translated words have to match the movements of the speaker’s lips, which implies the harmony between the articulation of consonants and vowels pronounced by the actors and the sound we hear; the congruence between what is visually and acoustically perceived.
Linear synchronism or isochrony, on the other hand, refers to the fact that the translated utterance needs to fit the gap between the moment the speaker starts moving her/his lips and the moments he/she stops (Whitman-Linsen, 1992).
Gestural or kinetic synchronism is also important, since, as Sapir claims (1966: 166), “ the field of gestures interplays constantly with that of language proper” thus specifying
or reinforcing the meaning of the words. Some gestures are common to different cultures, but at the same time, each language and culture has its own characteristic gestures, so it is not always easy to match the translated text with the gestures of the speaker.
Rhythmic synch is more complex and involves a varieties of factors, i.e. the syntactic rhythm of the original language, the speed of acting and the pitch used by the actor. Other acoustic constraints to be taken into account are the idiosyncratic vocal type, the use of voice and the dialects.
The idiosyncratic vocal type refers to the compatibility between the voice of the dubbing actor and the image, personality, character and attitude of the actor on the screen. Moreover, each speaker uses his voice in a different way modulating intonation, intensity and speed. Even if these prosodic elements are crucial in the dubbing process since they convey meanings beyond the semantic content of the utterance, they tend to disappear in the dubbed dialogue. This is even more evident for dialects, not only because it is difficult to find a correspondence in the target language but also because, paradoxically, dubbing actors are supposed to speak their mother language dialect-free. In the early years of dubbing, lip synch was considered the most important constraint to respect, however, in more recent times, researchers and professionals think that the greatest priority should be a believable convincing dialogue, where gestures and intonation are more crucial than lip synch.
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Each audiovisual product is a cultural representation of the world in which it is produced (Pettit, 2009), in fact, translation implies a mediation not only between two linguistic systems but also between two cultural systems. The task of the audiovisual translator is even more complex, since dialogues show not only specific features of the source language, but images as well.
The plot and the characters of an audiovisual product are built and shaped by various cultural factors: the social setting, internalised moral values, shared political and historical identity that constitute the cultural background of the audience, so the fact that they are taken for granted does not impair understanding. However, the situation is different when the audiovisual product is seen by an audience belonging to another culture, and therefore unlikely to understand many of the oral or visual cultural references, even if, after years of exposition to American films (as most of the dubbed films are produced in America), the audience is quite used to typical American cultural elements, such as high school proms or drive-in movies.
Pedersen proposes a categorisation of the cultural elements that can be found in audiovisual products (2005). He claims that nowadays cultures are interconnected, which implies that elements that were once familiar only to a specific culture, are now globally understandable and he defines them as transcultural (2005: 10). However, there are different degrees of transculturality, so there still are elements which are more difficult to be understood by other cultures, i.e. monocultural ones, and finally, there are elements which are strictly culture-specific and can be understood only by a limited number of people belonging to other cultures, i.e. microcultural.
Rossi (2006) notices that translators usually tend to explain all the elements which could be hard to understand in the target culture. For example, acronyms are usually developed as in:
{1} She was a senior delegate Faceva la delegata
at the Model UN. all’ONU scolastica
(Along Came Polly)
In the USA, some high school students can join the ONU as a school delegation, which is not possible in Italy. As consequence, the translator had to adapt the reference adding
the adjective scolastica to the name of the institution ONU, so that the Italian audience can understand it (Rossi, 2006: 315).
In other cases, adapting the untranslatable elements is not an option, as in the following example by Rossi (2006: 316):
{2} Maybe if I was like that movie kid, Se fossi stato un ragazzino Haley Joel Osment I could pay her prodigio tipo quello del
that much. Sesto senso avrei potuto
pagarla.
(About a Boy).
In this example, the translator decided to replace the name of the actor who played the boy in The Sixth Sense, with whom the Italian audience is not very familiar with the title of the film.
Other elements that are difficult to translate are names because they are deeply rooted in the original context and they often characterise the speaker. According to Rossi (2006: 300), different strategies are adopted to deal with names: they can be modified to be closer to Italian, i.e. they are pronounced in an Italian way (the sound is pronounced as / as in the name Keith which is pronounced / instead of in the Italian version of Desperate Housewives) or they are replaced with Italian names.
Sometimes the change is meant to trigger sociocultural references. For example, in the animated movie The Lady and the Tramp, the protagonist’s name Peg is replaced with Gilda in the dubbed version. This name evokes the character of the femme fatale played by Rita Hayworth in the homonymous film.
A particularly interesting issue in the translation from English to Italian is represented by terms of address. In English social meanings, such as the degree of intimacy between
speakers, are conveyed only by the terms of address (e.g.. the formal sir, madam are used to express respect towards the addressee, while the more informal son is used to show affection) because there is nowadays only one address pronoun, you. On the contrary, in Italian solidarity and social distance are conveyed not only by terms of address, but also by the address pronoun tu to show intimacy and lei for more formal relationships.
This difference between source and target language influences the translated language, for example, in dubbed language there is a higher occurrence of the informal pronoun tu due to an alleged greater familiarity between speakers in the English use. The influence of the source language on Italian is even more evident in the use of the combination of the pronoun and term of address; the formal pronoun lei is often used in combination with the name as an intermediate form between the formal lei and sir or madam and the informal tu and name, but this combination is not very common in Italian (Pavesi, 2005: 53). This choice is also due to the constraints of synchronism, since it allows the translator to match the lip movements by keeping the term of address.
Another frequent error which became a translating routine is the translation of the expression can I call you followed by the name with the expression posso chiamarla followed by the name, while in Italian the speaker would probably say possiamo darci
del tu? (Paolinelli, Di Fortunato, 2005: 69).
The translation of some terms of address became routine, i.e. Sir is always translated as
signore (often omitting the surname which in Italian is associated more with military
jargon than in everyday language), madam is translated with signora, man becomes
ragazzo, figliolo or sometimes amico.
According to Ranzato (2010), cultural elements are systematically removed in the translation of TV series leading to a more domesticated (Venuti, 1998) product. Ranzato claims that this depends on the fact that TV series are usually considered as second order products and consequently their translations are neglected. However, the relevance of the time factor and economic constraints of the dubbing process in the translation of TV products should not be underestimated.
As Whitman-Linsen points out, the cultural distance between source text and target audience inevitably forces the translator to make compromises, because complete correspondence is impossible. The translator is bound to transform some elements of the original film in order to facilitate their assimilation (1992: 126-127).
Pettit (2009: 45) relied on Tomaszkiewicz’s (1993) categorisation of the most common translating strategies used to translate “untranslatable” culture-specific terms3. There are eight different strategies:
1. omission: the omission of a culture-specific term simplifies the dialogue making it more understandable, but also more general and less expressive (there are some elements which are routinely omitted in the translation, i.e. ritual elements, such as conversational routines4, politeness formulae, affirmative and negative responses, exclamatory expressions and telephone replies (Laks, 1958: 24));
2. literal translation: in dubbing this is often due to the constraints of lip-synch;
3. borrowing (or loan words): these are not very frequent even if they could make lip-synch easier. This is due to the tendency to place the target text as close as possible to the target culture;
4. equivalence: this allows the maintenance of the original meaning and function, but it is more frequent in subtitling than in dubbing;
5. adaptation: this is often used to make the target text more acceptable and understandable by the target culture;
3 In fact, Tomaszkiewicz analysed the strategies used in subtitling rather that dubbing.
4 However, Bonsignori, Bruti and Masi (2008) have demonstrated that conversations play a crucial role in indexing social relationships between characters and their development in films. They noticed that notwithstanding the difference in the temporal mapping of “good forms”, systemic lexical gaps and stylistic variations, conversational routines are given much space both in English film language and dubbed Italian.
6. replacement of the cultural element with deictics: this particular strategy was not observed in dubbed language;
7. generalisation: this is used to simplify the dubbed text and improve understanding;
8. explication: this is rare and used to explain cultural terms that cannot be omitted and do not have a correspondent in the target culture, or to clarify the meaning of some words.
The need for reduction (for subtitling, since screen time and space constraints do not allow the transcription of all elements of each utterance in the subtitles and, moreover, people read more slowly that they understand spoken discourse) and lip-sync (for dubbing) are not the only factors influencing the translator’s choices. Other factors that may affect these choices are the type of audiovisual text (i.e. film, TV series, documentaries, news broadcast), the intended target audience (i.e. young or old, with specialised or limited knowledge), the format chosen for the distribution (i.e. DVD, cinema, television) and the requirements of the content of the programme itself (i.e. comedies, dramas, musicals or thrillers). In fact, Romero Fresco (2009: 46) identifies five extradiegetic features that represent relevant constraints for the realisation of a credible filmic dialogue:
a) limited screen time: since the screen time is limited, the dialogues have to be strictly functional (as already mentioned the functions of film language are closely linked to the plot of the film);
b) limited comprehension time: the audience has only a limited amount of time to decode the information presented;
c) economic impositions: audiovisual products have to conform to the expectations of the producing industries, television channels, advertising companies, target audience;
d) multiple authorship: different people write and rewrite the same script over and over again;
e) complex elaboration process: dialogues are carefully planned in order to achieve the illusion of spontaneous language, for an episode of a TV series, the dialogue are planned for two weeks, then it takes another two weeks to write them and in the next fifteen-twenty days they are acted and produced. However, the situation in Italy is rather different because, due to the economic pressure of the cinematographic market, the dubbing process has to be carried out in a much shorter time. Consequently, translators have less time to translate and adapt the dialogue and dubbing actors cannot see the whole film or episode, in the case of TV series.
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One of the areas influenced by synchrony and cultural constraints is lexicon. In fact, lexicon is a weak area in dubbing, since the words chosen by the translator often do not sound natural, they may even sound inconsistent in everyday language. This is frequently due to loan translations, when the translator chooses a word modelling it according to the source language in order to make lip-synch easier, as in the following example from the film Sliding Doors:
{3} Helen… Can you hear me? Helen? Puoi sentirmi?
In this case, the modal verb puoi sounds odd in Italian, since an Italian speaker would simply say mi senti? without the modal verb (Pavesi, 2005: 43).
Rossi (2006: 209- 311) and Pavesi (2005: 49) observe that the use of calques in audiovisual translation originated a series of translating routines in dubbed language,
i.e. posso aiutarla from may I help you instead of desidera?, lasciami solo from leave me alone instead of lasciami in pace, l’hai detto” from you said it instead of proprio
così. These expressions are now also commonly used in spontaneous conversation,
where they probably entered through dubbing, .
Moreover, translating routines can be used to translate the original neglected or substandard speech by means of jargon. Pavesi (2005: 49) proposes an example form Finding Forrester:
{4} Hold on. Hold hold on. Ehi, frena, frena. Tu hai un piselletto così.
Oscar Mayer Wiener5. Falla finita. L’hai preso più volte tu di
Stop playing, man. You got Tina Turner dal marito. L’ho visto beat like Tina in school one day . io.
The expressions hold on (literally in Italian aspetta un minuto) and stop + ing form are translated with two expressions that are typical of dubbed language, i.e. frena and falla
finita. These expressions are recognised by the audience who knows that they represent
typical features of the jargon of a young black man from the Bronx.
The use of calques also formed some neologisms, i.e. piedipiatti from flatfoot to refer to policemen or the introduction of the term of address fratello to characterise the speech of young black people, as in the following example from Finding Forrester:
{5} You was in there tonight? Bene, fratello, hai visto la partita?
5 Wiener is a type of sausage, which may be not known to the Italian public, so the translator decided to
In this case, the vocative is added in the translated utterance in order to character the speech as black English, which is rendered with the substandard form you was in the original version (Pavesi, 2005: 47).
The use of loan translations can be justified by the interference or transfer from the source language to the target language, i.e. a phenomenon belonging to the source language tends to be transferred into the target text (Toury, 1995: 275). This can result either in a negative interference, when the translated text is not compatible with the target language, or in a positive interference, when the frequency of a phenomenon already occurring in the target language is increased.
According to Toury, the interference is increased in the case of filmic translations because the translator is bound to take the original audiovisual text into account more than a traditional text due to the constraints of quantitative and paralinguistic synchronism. Moreover, the translator inevitably divides the text in turns, and the fragmentation of the text leads to a major interference of the original text on the target text (Toury, 2005).
The constraint of synchronism can also explain the use of loan translation, since it is easier to match the speaker’s movement with a word closer to the original one; nevertheless the result is a plain language, devoid of the peculiar features of the target language. In most cases, the textual relationships holding within the original text are not reproduced in the translated text, and the text sounds plain and more banal. As a consequence, marked choices in the original text, may lose part or all of the features that make them marked in the target language and become more unnatural elements. This coincides with a levelling of the features typical of spontaneous speech.
Another feature of the lexicon observed by Rossi (1999, 2006) is that colloquial expressions tend to be replaced with more formal expressions leading to a diaphasic level rise, as in the following examples:
{6} You might say just the opposite. I termini della proposizione si potrebbero anche invertire
(Scene da un Matrimonio)
{7} I can’t, I can’t. What are you Non posso, non ce la faccio, vuoi
trying to do? dirmi qual è il tuo scopo?
In both examples, the Italian version has undergone a formal refinement, moreover, in the second example, the repetition is replaced by a different expression, i.e. non posso and non ce la faccio.
Laviosa - Braithwaite (1998) has also observed that, in dubbing, the tendency is to level out some of the characteristics of the original text, namely, sociolinguistically marked elements and substandard varieties. This fact contributes to creating a plain language, which sounds off to native speakers, since it does not look like the language they are used to speaking in everyday life.
Obscene language is a meaningful example, since this type of language, which is related to a higher degree of informality, the use of slang and substandard varieties in the original language, tend to be mitigated or even omitted in dubbed language, due both to censorship and to difficulties in the translation. Some examples from the film Fa’ la
cosa giusta are: Watts is gonna shit if he sees you, translated as Watte andrà su tutte le furie, or It’s a goddam shame” as E’ davvero una vergona. This tendency leads the
translator to create unusual solutions, such as Ehi, palle di merda that translates bullshit in the film I guerrieri della notte, or the use of unusual expression due to calques from English, i.e. dannazione form damn or damned instead of the more frequent
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The tendency towards standardisation and normalisation in the dubbed language can also be observed at a phonetic level. This feature is particularly problematic when the translator has to face geographical variation, both because finding a correspondent in the target language is almost impossible and because of the difficulty in rendering the phonologic variation of the different regions. Moreover, each actor has his own voice, tone and accent that are difficult to find in another person or to imitate.
Italian dialects are usually connected with particular rhetoric functions in the Italian comic tradition, i.e. Neapolitan people are considered cunning while people from Bologna are usually kind (Pavesi, 2005: 37).
British films are characterised by a great diatopic and diastratic variation which is evident in the phonologic features of the dialogues. However, this variation does not show in the translation which results phonetically normalised. Pavesi (2005: 37) gives an example from the film Billie Elliot, where in the dubbed version Billie’s father speaks like all the other miners, whereas in the original his northern accent distinguishes and sets him apart from all the other miners. Because of this neutralisation, the Italian audience fails to fully understand the relationships between the characters.
According to Galassi (1994), dialects are usually employed in a parodistic and grotesque way and not to characterise the speaker sociolinguistically. This tendency could be explained with the policy carried out by Fascism to eliminate dialogues (see paragraph 2).
However, Pavesi underlines that there are some dubbed films where the sociolinguistic features are successfully translated, even if dialect and regional Italian seem to be used mostly for criminal, comic or fantastic characters: in Il Padrino, the characters speak with a Sicilian accent, while in Gli Aristogatti Romeo has a Roman accent. As Bruti (2009) claims, Romeo shows most of the features of the Roman accent, i.e. rotacism
(dolce>dorce), apocope (ma pure da emigrato so’ cambiato), assimilation (fasse
rispettà)6.
Moreover, the other animal characters coming from different countries (i.e. Russia, Italy, China) are both physically and phonetically characterised. In the dubbed version, they are even more clearly characterised thanks to phonetic variation and foreign vocabulary. The Chinese cat replaces the central approximant /r/ with the lateral /l/ (.i.e.
folza). In the case of the Russian cat, the vocabulary represents the most characterising
element, i.e. the word tovarisch, which means comrade, is typically associated with Russian culture (Bruti, 2009).
In some cases, the original soundtrack needs to be replaced because it is ruined or got lost and the language is usually updated as well. Rossi (2006) compared two dubbed versions of the animated movie Lilly e il Vagabondo (i.e. 1955 and 1970 versions). He noticed that the Siamese cats showed more Chinese features in the first dubbed version, that is not only the use of /l/ instead of /r/, but also the rhyming apocope (i.e. Questa
casa ispezionar doddiam // se ci garba un pezzo ci lestiam). On the contrary, in the
second version, the rhyming apocope disappears because it is considered redundant and dated.
On the contrary, at a morphosyntactic level, there are many occurrences of items belonging to spoken language. For example, right and left dislocations and cleft sentences are very frequent and the indicative mood is often used instead of the subjunctive in hypothetic sentences. Consider the following examples of dislocations:
{8} How do you think those Chi le pulisce le finestre?
6 In this case, the flexibility is due to two factors: the comic genre that allow more freedom with the use of accents and dialects and the fact that the lip synchronism is easier since the speakers are antropomorphised animals. Actually, Disney is more strict about lip synchronism also in the case of animals.
windows get cleaned?
{9} You write your first draft La prima stesura la devi with your heart. buttare giù col cuore.
(Finding Forrester)
And of the use of indicative mood instead of subjunctive in an hypothetic sentence:
{10} Se non prendevi quella porcheria forse riuscivi a ragionare con la tua testa (Brincat, 2000: 250)
More generally, dubbed language reflects the level of syntactic complexity shown by spontaneous speech, which means that there is a lower proportion of subordination (Pavesi, 2009). This feature is consistent with the frequency of connectors, i.e. the most frequent connector is che, which can be a general complementiser, a relative pronoun and an interrogative pronoun. Pavesi argues that in the functional distribution of che in dubbed Italian is similar to that of spontaneous Italian, i.e. che is more frequent. Further evidence is provided by the frequency of other subordinating connectors, i.e. se and
quando, whose frequency is close to that of spontaneous Italian and more formal
connectors, such as nonostante, tuttavia, sebbene, benché, which are typical of written language and are rare in spontaneous and dubbed language.
In spontaneous spoken language, weak connectors (i.e. general linking words, that do not create syntactic dependencies between sentences and can be used with discourse marking function, such as e, allora and ma) are very frequent (Pavesi, 2009: 205). The
frequency of these items in dubbed language is slightly lower than in spontaneous language, which is consistent with its simpler syntax (Taylor 2004).
Moreover, in spoken language pronouns are more frequent due to the deictic nature of spoken discourse and in dubbed films the second person pronoun you is even more frequent than in spontaneous speech, which could be explained by the highly interactional style of film language (i.e. shorter turns and more questions) leading to a more listener-oriented discourse (Rossi, 2002). Not only the frequency but also the use of pronouns is very close to spoken language, i.e. the clitic pronoun gli is also used instead of the feminine form le and the plural loro as it frequently happens in Italian. Consider the following example proposed by Pavesi (2005: 39):
{11} Tutti i giorni c’è gente che gli tagliano la luce, che gli tagliano il gas. (Riff Raff)
The same features are coherent with those identified by Brincat (1998) in his study on the reception of the dubbed versions of American TV series. Brincat observed that Maltese people prefer watching American series (i.e. Beverley Hills 90210) dubbed in Italian rather than in English notwithstanding their proficiency in English (In Malta, English is studied at a young age at school). As a consequence, Brincat hypothesised that dubbed Italian was more easily understandable and to the purpose compared the language of two popular TV series, i.e. I ragazzi del muretto, which was shot in Italy, and Beverly Hills 90210, which was shot in America and dubbed in Italian.
He noticed that the syntax of the dubbed TV series is more standardised, i.e. there are no incomplete utterances apart from right or left dislocations and cleft sentences (1998: 251). Furthermore, utterances are almost always completed in the same turn and are not divided in different turns as happens in real conversation, which is indexical of the cooperation between speakers. One of the rare examples of an utterance divided into two turns can be found in the film Sliding Doors (Pavesi, 2005: 33)
{12} HELEN: Excuse me. Um, I’m sorry. I, I’m sure you’re not a nutcase or a psycho or anything, it’s just that, um, I’m not good at, um, you know, um
JAMES: Constructing sentences?
In this example, James steps in and helps Helen finish her utterance as he sees that she is having difficulty in saying what she has in mind (which is also shown by the discourse marker you know), to relieve her embarrassment.
Moreover, discourse markers are very frequent, which is a marker of orality, but they appear either at the beginning or at the end of the turn, which is consistent with the non-fragmentary syntax of dubbed Italian since they do not interrupt the syntax of the utterance (1998: 253).
Pavesi (2009) claims that marked word order constructions allow greater dilution of information that makes both production and understanding easier. In addition, marked word order constructions seems to be more recurrent in spoken Italian than in spoken English and Pavesi noticed that in dubbed language they are often added to the translation and they function as markers of orality.
Another feature which shows the influence of English over dubbed Italian is the use of progressive forms (Brincat,1998: 250). Consider the following example:
{13} He is eating. Sta mangiando.
In fact, in Italian it is possible to translate the gerund with different forms, i.e. present simple (i.e. mangia) or the form “stare + gerund” but the most frequent in spontaneous Italian is the first one. On the contrary, in the dubbed version of Beverly Hills 90210,
gerunds are more frequently translated with the form “stare + gerund” (there are 42 occurrences of “stare + gerund” in I Ragazzi de Muretto and 66 in Beverly Hills
90210).
Brincat measured the complexity of the syntax on the basis of the ratio between the number of turns and words and he found that both the Italian and the dubbed TV series have the same number of words, but Beverley Hills 90210 shows a higher proportion of turns. This means that in the dubbed TV series the turns are shorter and more frequent, making the syntax less elaborated.
Another mark of orality is the fact that turns often overlap, but this feature is very rare in dubbed language. This is not only meant to make the dialogue easier to understand but depends on the fact that each dubbing actor records his part autonomously (due to the short time available to dub films and TV series) (Rossi, 2006). Moreover, the dialogues are more easily understandable thanks to the pauses between blocks of information, which gives the audience time to process information (Pavesi, 2005: 33). A peculiar feature of British English, i.e. question tags, is often used in film language to characterise British people. The functions of question tags are very similar in English and Italian, but their frequency and syntactic structure are different. While in English question tags are very frequent and they are formed by inverting the pronoun and the auxiliary with inverted polarity, in Italian they are rarer and they are formed with the interrogative eh? or no?.
Pavesi (2005: 54) noticed that in dubbed Italian question tags are often translated imitating English syntax and making up some translating routine, such as vero?/non è
vero?. However, generally speaking, Italian actors sound more assertive and less
collaborative than English actors, who often appear insecure in the way they talk. In fact, this feature is sometimes used to distinguish between British and American actors.
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Notwithstanding the fact that dubbed Italian has become more similar to spontaneous language thanks to the insights into spontaneous speech and into audiovisual translation, there are still some features which betray its planned natures, i.e. the lexicon which is heavily influenced by the source language, the levelling of phonetic and sociolinguistic variation).
On the other hand the syntactic and morphologic features of dubbed language show a greater degree of similarity to spoken language (i.e. lower syntactic complexity, the presence of discourse markers), which demonstrates that translators seems to give priority to structural phenomena in order to simulate spoken language. This may also be accounted for by the constraints typical of this type of translation, i.e. synchronism. So, it is possible to say that dubbed language is influenced both by the tendency towards standardisation, that leads to a less spontaneous language, and the inference of the original language. In fact, Meyers introduced the term dubbese in 1937, because dubbed language shows specific features that allow us to distinguish it from spontaneous language.
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According to various definitions in literature, interjections are a fairly heterogeneous class of items. Examples in English include wow, yuk, aha, ouch, oops, ah, oh, er, huh,
eh. The word interjection derives from Latin and means “thrown between”, which
underlines the loose grammatical connection these elements have with the rest of the sentence, as they actually do not establish syntactic dependencies with other elements and can be placed almost everywhere in the sentence.
Notwithstanding the fact that interjections are a word class that can be found in all languages (Ameka, 1992: 101), they have been long ignored by linguists.
Actually, in the history of linguistic studies, the term interjection has been used to describe other linguistic elements, i.e. discourse markers (Fraser, 1990 and Bazzanella, 1995), conversational routines, exclamations, inserts (Biber et al, 1999) leading thus to some confusion.
Interjections have often been treated as marginal to language, i.e. Latin grammarians defined them as non-words claiming that they are independent from syntax and that they are used to express only feelings or states of mind. Greek grammarians considered interjections as a subclass of adverbials since they determine the meaning of the verb. The link between interjections and verbs is emphasised also by some Modistae (i.e.
Martin of Dacia and Thomas Erfurt). According to them, interjections determine the verb in relation to the mind of the speaker, who is expressing his/her state of mind. However, one of this group of scholars, namely Singer of Courtrai, recognized the syntactic independence of interjections, defining them as a part of speech which is used to convey various states of mind and as close to the verb because emotional states are caused by the feature of movement (Bursill- Hall, 1971: 120).
Interjections have also been treated as utterance substitutes, for example, among others by John Wilkins (1992) and Cuenca (2000). Consequently, they are not considered as a part of speech, i.e. for a word level category, but as an element of syntax, i.e. for a sentence level category.
The fact that in the past interjections were treated either as a part of speech and or an element of syntax has been a source of confusion which is mirrored in present day treatment of interjections (Ameka, 1992: 103).
In the twentieth century, linguists have argued that interjections do not constitute a part of speech. More precisely, Jespersen (1924: 90) claims that those words belonging to other parts of speech, i.e. nouns, verbs, etc. but which are used as interjections (i.e. as non-elliptical utterances) should not constitute a separate class. This remark is quite important in the study of interjections, since part of the confusion about them was due to the fact that linguists mixed up functions and categories.
Actually, the question whether interjections are part of the language or not has been addressed by many linguists, but they do not agree on the answer. However, all scholars agree that interjections convey information about the mental or emotional state of the speaker and that they can constitute an utterance by themselves in a non-elliptical way. This situation has been caused by the vague nature of interjections, which makes it difficult to decide whether they are part of language as words or if they are paralinguistic phenomena (Goffman, 1981). Moreover, even if most linguists seem to agree that they convey meaning, they do not agree on how they do so.
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Goffman (1981) claims that interjections are not part of language. As a matter of fact, Goffman is a sociologist and analyses interjections in terms of their socio-communicative role more than referring to any linguistic content they may have.
He defines interjections as “response cries”, thus pointing out that these sounds are always intended for the benefit of others. In this sense, response cries could be considered as communicative events, since they are aimed to convey information to others. However, Goffman considers them as communication more in an ethological sense than in a linguistic one. This means that response cries, rather than saying something show something about the internal state of the speaker. Goffman defines them as “a natural overflowing, a flooding up of previously contained feeling, a bursting of normal restraints, a case of being caught off guard” (1981: 99).
They communicate in a way which is more similar to clothes or make up rather than to speech; the difference lies in the fact that response cries are referred to the way the speaker feels towards a temporary event, while clothes or make up may be interpreted as showing the way the speaker feels about the social occasion he/she is attending. Even if interjections are intended for the benefit of others, they do not belong to the conversational exchange, in fact the other participant in the exchange does not feel compelled to reply to them. In fact, utterances are usually organized into turns at talk, which implies the fact that each participant in the conversation either takes the floor to speak or listens to the other participant . Consequently, each utterance either establishes the next speaker’s words as a reply or a it is a reply to the former speaker’s utterance (1981: 78).
Goffman proposes a classification of standard cries: the transition display brr! is used when leaving a cold atmosphere and entering a warm one to show a marked state of natural discomfort. On the contrary, ahh! and phew! are uttered when the speaker leaves a hot place to enter a cool one, but in this case, the function of the interjections is not clear. Goffman hypothesises that these sounds give the speaker a moment to orient himself in the new climatic context or perhaps they express relief on leaving an uncomfortable environment.
Spill cries such as oops! and woops! are used in case of minor mishaps. Goffman wonders why people advertise their incompetence by emitting these sounds. The first possibility he proposes is that the speaker is trying to define the event as a mere accident and isolating it from the rest of his/her behaviour. On the other hand, since these interjections are usually uttered in case of minor accidents, they could be used to downplay the import of a more serious accident. Moreover, Goffman claims that spill cries could be uttered as evidence of the speaker’s presence of mind in recognising his/her failure. Finally, these sounds can provide the audience with a warning that something bad is happening and that they should pay attention to it.
Threat startles such as eek! and yipe! convey surprise and fear and are typically feminine. However, it must be noted that the event causing these reaction is usually not very dangerous and the speaker is not in real danger, but simply acknowledges the possibility of danger.
Finally, revulsion sounds, i.e. eeuw! are uttered when coming in contact with something that is not pleasant and are more likely to be heard from women. Sometimes, the speaker who makes this sound can be excused while he/she gets rid of the non-pleasant agent.
So far, the cries have been considered as uttered outside the context of a conversation, but they can also be uttered by individuals involved in conversations or in a common task. For example, the purpose of strain grunts is to warn others that at the moment the speaker cannot concentrate on anything else and pay attention to others. Goffman adds that even though these sound are thought to be unintentional, the glottis must be closed in order to produce them, so they have a voluntary component.
In all these instances, the interlocutor does not feel compelled to reply to the speaker, even if he/she understands what he/she means by his/her cries and that the cries are uttered for his benefit. In other cases, not only is the cry addressed to the hearer, but the hearer is also expected to react either by saying something or doing something.
For example, the function of the pain cry ouch! is pretty clear, i.e. it signals that a threshold of pain is being reached and it is often addressed to others, for example to a
