Italian dialetti in audiovisual translation: perspectives on three quality TV series

In this contribution we have decided to investigate into the translating strategies of famous and successful Italian productions that are strongly characterised by the use of dialect. If on the one hand dialect lends narratives an undisputed quality of authenticity, although, as shall be seen, it is always a crafted representation in which specific traits have been chosen, its presence makes translation into a target language and culture quite challenging. In particular, apart from focusing on Il Commissario Montalbano (Camilleri 1999-in production), the theme of the conference from which this chapter stems (Ragusa e Montalbano: voci del territorio in traduzione audiovisiva 2017), we meant to include other Italian productions that have in recent times been considered quality productions and have been profitably exported abroad such as Romanzo criminale (Sollima 2008-2010) and Gomorra (Saviano 2014-in production). These two series, together with Il Commissario Montalbano and 1992 (Accorsi 2015), have been recognised as an undisputed success abroad (Pallante 2017), but the three we have selected for this investigation share interesting narrative and stylistic features.