Period television drama: culture specific and time specific references in translation for dubbing.

While reviewing some of the main scholarly contributions to the analysis of culture specific references in the field of Translation Studies and, more specifically, of Audiovisual Translation, this article offers an overview of the classifications for translating these particular elements, which various scholars have proposed over time, and illustrates a new taxonomy for their categorisation based on the relativity of the concept. Scholars have tended to discuss cultural references almost exclusively as objects and people set in a certain place and in terms of their geographical distance from the target culture, while keeping time specificity in the background of their discourse. However, all culture bound elements are also time specific, even if some of these elements have acquired a ‘timeless’ quality which sets them apart from the majority. The notion of ‘asynchronous references’ is thus specifically introduced here to describe those elements which do not belong to the same time in which the members of the audience live. This category may be useful to analyse films and TV programmes whose particular aim is to portray another era, notably costume dramas and period TV shows. The closer to our time the depicted epoch is, the more we realise how relatively short the lifespan of some culture specific references is in people’s memories. Two case studies will be analysed, centred on the television series Life on Mars (UK) and Mad Men (USA), to show two very different handlings, in the translation for dubbing in Italy, of period drama shows. As well as trying to capture the essential strategy of period television and the subtle pleasure transmitted especially by TV series set in a past which is distant but not remote, this contribution will share the results of a descriptive analysis carried out on a substantial number of episodes from these shows, meant to investigate on the strategies used by the dubbing adapters into Italian to translate some of the features that mark their dialogues, with a particular emphasis, for their relevance and incidence, on culture specific and time specific references.