Il doppiaggio di film anglo-americani in italiano : Citizen Kane e The silence of the lambs

Abstract

This dissertation explores various linguistic aspects arising from the dubbing of two American films in Italian: Citizen Kane as Quarto potere, 1941, and The Silence of the Lamb as Il silenzio degli innocenti, 1992. The fifty years that separate the dubbing of the two films also affords the opportunity to compare the varieties of Italian used in both versions as well as describe some aspects in the development of the language. The dubbed version of the earlier film reveals close ties with written Italian while in the more recent film one can find a closer affinity with the spoken language. This essentially linguistic study focuses mainly on a grammatical and sociolinguistic analysis of the language used in the films and investigates the difficulties inevitably encountered by the translators in these respects. Moreover it explores the cultural differences which render translation problematic and often leave the translator no option but to depart from the original cultural reference replacing it with one that the Italian audience is familiar with. Finally this thesis deals with what is considered to be the main objective of Italian film translators today. that of producing a version which reflects as much as possible the language as it is spoken thus giving the film a feeling of authenticity that today's audiences expect. To reach this aim the lexical, morphological and syntactic choices made by the translators are analysed.