Trailers and promos and teasers, oh my! Adapting television paratexts across cultures

In an attempt to argue that the study of linguistic and cultural issues should occupy a more prominent role than the one generally granted to them in the literature on global media and the international circulation of media products (e.g. Straubhaar 2007; Harrington and Bielby 2008; Havens 2006), this chapter proposes to look at how expansions are adapted when television series are imported into a different lingua-cultural system than the one in which those shows were originally created. By drawing on examples from officially distributed promotional content, this chapter considers which parataxis are privileged when US TV series are imported into the Italian market, and what strategies are chosen for their linguistic and cultural adaptation. On a larger scale, this study tries to achieve a better understanding of the ways in which the strategies employed in the adaptation of various expansions for Italian audiences help repackage and reframe the shows for the target culture, specifically in terms of genre and viewer expectations. In this sense, this essay deals with translation in the broader sense of cultural adaptation or transposition rather than with translation meant exclusively in the more traditional textual sense of source language to target-language transfer.