Morphological and semantic simplification in dubbing techniques : translating the dialogue of the British films Ae Fond Kiss... and The Queen

Abstract

It is widely agreed that in Italy the art of dubbing foreign films is mainly seen as an attempt to bring the dialogue closer to the audience to whom it is addressed, a fact that has been defined by Sergio Raffaelli as “the need to make it comprehensible to as wide an audience as possible” (Raffaelli 1994: 290, my translation) – and explained by Maria Pavesi as “the relative freedom of the dubbing scriptwriter to seek the best rendering in the target language, keeping in mind, primarily, the difficulties that the original would create for the foreign audience” (Pavesi 2005: 22-23 – my translation). The first time I realised that dubbing implied the simplification of the original dialogue was when I directed a number of students writing a dissertation about Maltese children and teenagers who watched television serials in both English and Italian. We were struck by the fact that most of them preferred watching the Italian versions of Beverly Hills and The Young Indiana Jones, rather than the original versions which were broadcast on the Maltese channel. This was unexpected because Maltese children begin to learn English in nursery school, and some start speaking it at home at a very early age. Moreover, most of them had not taken formal lessons in Italian (Brincat 1992, 1998, 2000; Caruana 2003).