Target Language Influences over Source Texts: A Novel Dubbing Approach in The Simpsons, First Series

Although still in its infancy, the research conducted in the translation of foreign audio-visual texts, mainly Anglo-American, into Italian has already produced stimulating debates within the field of Sociolinguistics and Translation Studies (TS). Most scholars tend to agree that the final translated outcome far from reflects the language actually spoken by native Italians [1,2]. Indeed they argue that more often than not the language used in the most common mode of translation within the audio-visual setting, that is dubbing, proves to be a rather flat, stereotyped one, which is also influenced by the source language (SL). It is not surprising then that this kind of ‘dubbed Italian’ is commonly defined as doppiagese. The suffix at the end of this word in Italian carries negative connotations often referring to something produced in a quite approximate way. Nevertheless, it is worth highlighting that the peculiarities that lie behind the creation of the ‘dubbed Italian’ are the result of the specific characteristics of the audio-visual text itself. In other words, translators/dialogists opt for this rather flat type of language in the attempt of minimising the inner discrepancy between the visual and the verbal text. In addition, it is important to remember that time constraints, unavailability of adequate tools and inadequate stimuli often lead translators to uncreative results. Despite this apparently miserable scenario, this study focuses on an interesting exception, which is the well known North American animated TV comedy programme The Simpsons. A number of examples taken from the first series are presented here, both in the original and in the dubbed Italian version, in order to understand the reason for its indisputable success in Italy. Two hypotheses regarding the creative translation process are presented, namely the insertion of target culture sociolects and the use of dialects in the TT. The former suggests that some types of audio-visual texts benefit from the application of equivalent socioletcs to the TT because they compensate for the loss of the original ones and, at the same time, bring the audio-visual text closer to the target viewer’s everyday language. The latter, although often considered an exception only applicable to fictional and comic characters such as those in Disney films [2], propose the use of dialects within these types of texts because this target culture approach proves to be extremely effective with regards to its entertaining feature. In fact, target culture dialects and accents are likely to maximise the TT humorous effect. It goes without saying that while the former suggestion is feasible in both the subtitling and dubbing mode, the latter is only allowed in dubbing.