Telling a Different Story: the Rewriting of Homosexual Narratives in Dubbing

Against the backdrop of earlier explorations on gayspeak in audiovisual translation (AVT) (Ranzato 2012, Sandrelli 2016), the aim of this article is to look at the ways homosexual narratives in film (and television) have been frequently distorted in Italian dubbing through various means, including the manipulation of homosexual lexicon. More specifically, we will be looking at examples in which elimination and addition, both as translation strategies and as film editing procedures, have been used to tell virtually another story, one which deviated intentionally from the course established by the original authors, from their character and even plot construction. The suppression of gay lexicon or of words alluding to homosexuality was achieved not only through linguistic means but also through more specifically cinematic means, namely scene and sound editing. An attempt is thus made to look at the translated text from a purely translational perspective (i.e. the use of particular translation strategies) and from a film studies perspective (in this case, the role of editing and montage).