Between January and May 2003, Italy’s main TV channels broadcast an average of 352 hours of dubbed produce each week. The privately owned Mediaset group alone broadcast 218 hours weekly, thus qualifying as the most significant sponsor of the TV dubbing industry in Italy. Programmes which undergo the process of dubbing in Italy are mainly films and TV series, for a total of over 2000 minutes airing on weekdays and as might be expected, most produce is translated from American English. But what do we know about the quality of the translation of such programmes? In an era of instant communication with any location on the planet, ever more discerning audiences must surely be aware of the myriad of “culture bumps” (Leppihalme 1997) with which they are presented and with which screen translators have had to deal prior to airing. In extreme cases audiences are even witness to a radically different text from the original. Are audiences aware of this? Are they conscious of the fact that the language they hear is more artificial than the customary artificiality of TV talk (Goffmann 1981)? And even if they are, does this matter? After all, if a programme is a huge commercial success, is it of any importance if it is lacking in linguistic nuances or if it is culturally impenetrable in places? Moreover, should audiences be left to work things out independently as is traditionally the case, or could screen translations somehow assist audiences in understanding target texts to the full? All these issues involve quality, a problematic area which has been largely ignored as the European dubbing industry has invisibly gone ahead and done its own thing without much external control. This paper will illustrate the research design of a large scale research project which sets out to assess the quality of dubbed television programmes in Italy. Based upon a corpus of 1000 *mpg files reduced from over 300 hours of dubbed TV programmes, by means of Web Technology, a robust sample of respondents (over 5000) Italian viewers have been tested on their perception of dubbed Italian.
Antonini R., Chiaro D. (2009). The Perception of Dubbing by Italian Audiences. BASINGSTOKE : Palgrave Macmillan.
The Perception of Dubbing by Italian Audiences
ANTONINI, RACHELE;CHIARO, DELIA CARMELA
2009
Abstract
Between January and May 2003, Italy’s main TV channels broadcast an average of 352 hours of dubbed produce each week. The privately owned Mediaset group alone broadcast 218 hours weekly, thus qualifying as the most significant sponsor of the TV dubbing industry in Italy. Programmes which undergo the process of dubbing in Italy are mainly films and TV series, for a total of over 2000 minutes airing on weekdays and as might be expected, most produce is translated from American English. But what do we know about the quality of the translation of such programmes? In an era of instant communication with any location on the planet, ever more discerning audiences must surely be aware of the myriad of “culture bumps” (Leppihalme 1997) with which they are presented and with which screen translators have had to deal prior to airing. In extreme cases audiences are even witness to a radically different text from the original. Are audiences aware of this? Are they conscious of the fact that the language they hear is more artificial than the customary artificiality of TV talk (Goffmann 1981)? And even if they are, does this matter? After all, if a programme is a huge commercial success, is it of any importance if it is lacking in linguistic nuances or if it is culturally impenetrable in places? Moreover, should audiences be left to work things out independently as is traditionally the case, or could screen translations somehow assist audiences in understanding target texts to the full? All these issues involve quality, a problematic area which has been largely ignored as the European dubbing industry has invisibly gone ahead and done its own thing without much external control. This paper will illustrate the research design of a large scale research project which sets out to assess the quality of dubbed television programmes in Italy. Based upon a corpus of 1000 *mpg files reduced from over 300 hours of dubbed TV programmes, by means of Web Technology, a robust sample of respondents (over 5000) Italian viewers have been tested on their perception of dubbed Italian.I documenti in IRIS sono protetti da copyright e tutti i diritti sono riservati, salvo diversa indicazione.
