The mediation is the message
Italian regionalization of US TV series as
co-creational work
●
Luca Barra
Università Cattolica del Sacro Cuore, Italy
A B S T R A C T ● The article focuses on the co-creational labour made by professionals (and non-professionals) who, in a non-Anglo-Saxon country such as Italy, adapt and modify (heavily or slightly) the ‘original’ media products
(i.e. TV series) in order to make them accessible to the domestic audience. After a concise introduction on the ‘Italianization’ process, the article proceeds to describe two ways of adapting nationally: the professional translation and dubbing system and the grassroots fansubbing phenomenon. The attention is both on the production routines and on their influence on the meaning of the text.●
K E Y W O R D S ● dubbing● fansubbing● globalization● media production
● media professionals● national adaptation● subtitling● TV series ● translation studies
In my childhood, some elderly English ladies … often gave me books as presents … All were in the language of the donors: whether I could read it, none of them paused to reflect. (T.W. Adorno, 1951/2005: 26)
Introduction
Media products have become – and, to some extent, have always been – global: the constant diffusion of worldwide corporations and cultural phe-nomena, the ‘reduction’ of the world (or at least of some of its parts) into what Marshall McLuhan called a ‘global village’ and the international
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CULTURALstudies
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mobility of both technologies and texts are fundamental aspects that shape the culture and the world we live in. But this situation is multifaceted: as a matter of fact, global media products often arrive to national – in this essay, Italian – contexts in a partially different form, specifically reformulated for local audiences and dissimilar from what was originally conceived by authors and professionals who worked on them.
Texts, originally intended for a different language and culture, have to face an ‘Italianization’ process: this term defines a series of sophisticated routines, on both the production and consumption side, that mediate between the cul-tures of countries of origin and destination, giving birth to a new, specifically created, product. The mediation influences both the form and meaning of the text and its reception and success (or failure), leads to linguistic and cultural adjustments necessary to translate (in the widest sense) and to adapt effectively the product, involves different media workers. The Italianization process absorbs a large number of professionals, who bring their ‘occupational ideology’ (Deuze, 2007) – or better, ideologies, often in conflict, a pre-formed series of ideas and working habits, each one at the same time cause and con-sequence of the nature of media working routines and of consequent ‘media logic’. And those ideas, following uncommon paths, have to be summed to original professionals’ ones, giving birth to a unique mix of creation and re-creation practices that affect every foreign text.
The awareness of the transnational exchange of media products has fre-quently lead to oversimplifying this process in terms of ‘globalization’, often conceived as ‘cultural imperialism’, and ‘glocalization’, where promi-nence is given to local resistances and negotiations (Sassen, 2007). Focusing on mediation and distribution procedures forces to re-collocate in a power-ful position another dimension, never really disappeared but too often underestimated: the nation, ‘imagined community’ (Anderson, 1991) that – although constantly losing strength on the political and economic side in a ‘networked society’ – still maintains a huge cultural impact. The nation is an important constructor of meaning. As Roland Barthes (1957) pointed out, if language and culture universality is only an ‘intermediate myth’, aimed to transform the real world into an image, ‘history’ into ‘nature’, national identity enables the recognition of the important role played by history in society and culture.
So, regionalization and adaptation processes are usually planned on a national basis. This happens for various reasons. The first one is linguistic: in many countries, including Italy, language is a fundamental element of national identity; in order to reach a wide audience, the linguistic barrier has to be overcome, and so the translation plays a fundamental (although not exclusive) role in the Italianization process. The second reason is tied to the media system, ‘the media set of a given moment in a society, and its network of relationships, complementarities, mutual exclusions, interdependence’ (Ortoleva, 2002: 28), whose partitions are organized nationally. Even multi-national media conglomerates usually have multi-national subsidiaries in charge of some productions; distribution networks (publishing houses, broadcast fre-quencies, CDs and movies) mainly coincide with national borders; market-ing and promotion are often scheduled differently (in timetables and forms) according to the destination country; finally, ‘whatever form the industry takes in a particular country, it operates within nationally specific state reg-ulatory systems that might include censorship boards, cultural ministries, and broadcast licensing agencies’ (Bielby and Harrington, 2008: 11). A third reason is due to the conservative habits of mainstream audiences, and – maybe, consequentially – of media workers. For instance, if the public is socialized to dubbing – and, at least in Italy, it is – the majority would refuse a non-dubbed movie: to reach a wide audience, it is better not to change deep-rooted consumption traditions (and expectations).
The global trade of media products has often been studied as an ‘Americanization’, a sort of ‘colonization of the imaginary’ (Augé, 1997) lead by a powerful – often irresistible – central empire towards economic, social and cultural world peripheries (De Grazia, 2005). Even when the attention is centered on the ‘middle range’ of world distribution practices (as in Bielby and Harrington, 2008), the country of origin, where markets takes place, matters far more than the destination one, with its own reception. Instead, the analysis of the Italianization process allows us to turn the tide: the focus shifts from the partial levelling caused by the pro-gressive diffusion of a media koiné, a common language, to the variety of interpretations, variations, re-appropriations produced by the encounter – however, not au pair– of two different cultures, habits, languages, media systems, production routines.
Invisible actors and beyond: Professional Italianization
In Italy, just as in the other big European countries where English is not the first language, Anglo-Saxon TV products (and movies) are generally dubbed, in order to be easily understood and appreciated by a wider public – who increase the ratings, or buy the tickets or the DVDs. Therefore, Italian people see a partially different version of the text, distant in many ways from the original one: nevertheless, the audience is so used to Italianized series and films that it barely notices the complex work involved in the adaptation. The series is identified and defined by the names of its authors, directors and lead-role actors, while no one usually pays attention to other professionals that play a major role in making a text ready for – and successful to – an Italian audience.
The Italianization process involves a large number of heavily specialized professionals, who participate in the co-creation of the Italian edition of a US franchise: the Italian version of the Simpsons (Barra, 2007, 2008), for instance, presents light or major changes both in technical aspects – the entire sound track, some frames – and in meaning – cultural references, linguistic gags, accents and dialects … These professionals, involved in stable produc-tion routines, work on the text bringing in different concepproduc-tions of transla-tion and dubbing, preconceptransla-tions on the Italian audience,1interiorized labour
procedures. They are part of a group with a definite ideology, that intends to perpetuate – in the easiest way – the role of this particular kind of translation, also against the more and more diffused (but still confined into minority) request of an ‘original’ version. As Bielby and Harrington point out,
televisual elements vary considerably in their ability to travel undistorted through the site of distribution – from the TV text itself (routinely altered by dubbing, subtitling and censorship) to its genre categorization to the reputational identities of the actors, actresses, producers, and creators attached to it, and so on. Each element is negotiated, contested, and re-examined during distribution, often by a set of different actors working in a different business culture than at other sites of the circuit. (Bielby and Harrington, 2008: 172–3)
All the ‘automatisms’ apply to all audiovisual products imported, and affect or modify each one of them.
These production – better, mediation – routines are deeply rooted in the cinema dubbing system, born in Italy soon after the introduction of cine-matographic audio. In almost 80 years, the processes have been constantly optimized, thanks to technological and cultural innovations, and became inte-riorized by both media professionals and the audience. With the birth of tele-vision and the arrival of a large number of foreign ‘ready-made’ products, they were applied, with few changes, to television industry.
focusing mainly on the professionals involved and on the subsequent variations the original text undergoes.
The first step is ‘rights acquisition’. In order to be broadcast in Italy, the series has to be bought: the international distributor sells the rights for inter-national syndication to free networks and pay TV,2sometimes allowing the
‘cherry-picking’ of single top products, more often through volume rights deals that consent only a low level of selection. The licence allows a certain number of repeats in a set period of time, after which the deal has to be renewed. At this stage the main role is performed by broadcaster profession-als (network director and staff, sometimes a specific internal structure): they can decide, on the basis of the network’s needs and spaces, if a product must or must not be bought and scheduled, and – consequently – if it can or can-not be seen on that channel (or, if any network buys it, in Italy). When the licence is acquired, the international distributor provides the local broad-caster with all the necessary support material (copies of each episode, dia-logue transcriptions, original sound track, BGM sound track with only background music and songs). Then the Italianization process can start.
The following stage is ‘translation’. The first conversion in Italian is made only on the basis of the original script, reporting all the episodes’ dialogues and voices. It is a preliminary phase, where the translators, often selected through blind tests, transpose the lines and create the base working material for the next step. The translators, who often work also in the literary or tech-nical translation field, bring with them specific ideas, theories and working habits that influence the final product.
Fred Flintstone has been replaced in Homer’s line by Marco Columbro, the (then) popular presenter of the comedy programme Paperissima; references to the catchphrase ‘Che barba che noia’ (‘What a bore!’) of the Italian sit-com Casa Vianello have been inserted in at least two episodes. So, adapters generally prefer well-known Italian hooks to the supposedly obscure origi-nal meanings. During the adaptation phase, also other modifications can be decided, which not only affect the viewer’s interpretation of the text, but change it deeply: it is the case of the Italian version (La tata) of US series, The Nanny, where the Jewish origin of the main character played by Fran Drescher has been transformed into an Italo-American descent, made clear by a wide use of Southern Italian dialects and accents.3Adaptation is a
cen-tral moment, where the quality of the Italian edition has its base, but it is a not so clearly defined step too, in the middle between translation and dubbing and influenced by both. Of course there is an ‘official’ figure, the adaptor; but several different professionals are somehow involved: translators can do important adapting choices, voice actors and directors can make changes dur-ing the process, network executives can propose variations. Each figure has different working backgrounds, levels of power, abilities and purposes. As a result, some adaptation changes are not made (or not only) to improve voice synchronism, language complexity or precise cultural references, but according to a simplified idea of the audience – often considered by media workers as lazy, lethargic, unwilling to discover anything new – or looking for a simplification of the job – following a traditional routine is easier (and time-saving, and cheaper) than finding individual solutions for each case. Another common practice, then, is a frequent indulgence towards stereotypes, an easy way-out that could ‘level out’ the translated text: for instance, crimi-nal, lazy or bungling characters are often given a Neapolitan accent (e.g. in The Simpsons, Chief Wiggum, in Italy known as Commissario Winchester), confirming a national stereotype obviously absent in the original text.
whose job is to control in real time the synch and the length of every line, eventually inviting the actor to repeat some lines. In the direction room, sep-arated by a glass, the ‘dubbing director’ gives indications concerning quality, tone of voice, single effects, while the ‘sound engineer’ sets the recording of every track. National contracts, co-operatives and unions protect all these professionals; all have a highly specialized job, with highly specialized rou-tines. The problem here is that professionals’ objectives are not necessarily those of the authors, the ‘original’ professionals or the broadcasters: the nature of labour could affect the text and its meanings. Here are a few examples: the involvement of different people in different stages working on the same series could bring consistence problems, such as translations of names shifting from one season to another; the interventions operated ‘live’ on the script by dubbers and the dubbing director could insert some mistake, or oversimplify a simplified text; the necessity to reduce times and the fear of being called back to the studio to re-dub some parts could lead to censorship and auto-censorship processes, as in the case of the word ‘hashish’ eliminated by an Italian Simpsons episode.4 Economic motivations can interfere with
dubbing too: once again with The Simpsons, some songs are translated and sung by the dubbers (i.e. Iron Butterfly’s In a Gadda da Vida) to make the jokes more comprehensible, while others (i.e. Stonecutter’s We Do) are only subtitled due to high costs; to create mutual promotion, some Italian TV hosts dub as a guest voice one single episode, often superimposing their personality on previously appeared characters (i.e. Paolo Bonolis’ rendition of Lionel Hutz). To recap, ‘the dialogue is a planned construction’ (Barra, 2007), where cultural preconceptions and working issues are mixed.
The fifth step is ‘post-production’. It includes all the elaborations made to ‘create’ the Italian physical copy of each episode. The audio post-production embraces the synchronization and mixing of the different music and dubbing tracks, finally united in a single sound track harmonized with video. The video post-production consists of eventual subtitling – if there are parts spoken in a third language, conventionally not translated in the sound track – and of graphic interventions to explain signs and other textual information – visual changes usually limited to cartoons or comedies, such as in Simpsons’ witty posters and road signs on the streets and in front of the church. Each of these tasks also requires specialized professionals, whose role is to provide to the Italian version the best quality and coherence: i.e. the same words appearing both on video and on audio must be translated in the same way.
The last (major) stage is ‘scheduling’.5The broadcasting professionals have
decisions are taken on the basis of many variables: evaluation of the text, forecast on the expected public, counter-programming strategy, ‘traditional’ fixed positions. Once again, preconceptions about the audience formulated by professionals directly shape the Italian interpretation – and, at least par-tially, reception – of a foreign product. Once again, media workers’ tradi-tional routines can count as much as the characteristics of the series on the final output. And the scheduling choices, especially in a long-running series, can interfere with adaptation and dubbing routines. For instance, The Simpsons’ first two seasons (1991) were scheduled late at night, targeting an adult audience: adaptation and dubbing were particularly gross and vulgar, with dysphemisms added to the original script, in order to mark a precise dis-tinction with ‘normal’ cartoons. Since series three, all the following seasons have been (and still are) scheduled in daytime, looking for a younger audi-ence: so ‘bad words’ are now censored, cut or masked directly in the adapta-tion step, even when they are present in the original lines.
As can be seen in this quick review through the routines of Italian regionalization, a great deal of people intervene to adapt and modify, slightly or heavily, the original series, accumulating unexpected meanings, per-sonal idiosyncrasies and common stereotypes into the original structure: each of these media workers, notwithstanding – or maybe because of – their high professionalism, contributes in many ways to co-create the Italian edition of the TV series. And so, to co-create the TV series tout court, as it will be perceived in Italy. Often the impact of this kind of co-creative practice is hidden, or underestimated. But it strongly affects the text and its reception. Professionals and their production routines, on a national basis, impose – sometimes consciously, sometimes unconsciously – their habits and purposes: with divergent solutions during different steps, with (auto)censorship owed not to free-thought policies but ‘only’ to the nature of work, with precon-ceptions on the audience, with the diffusion (or, more often, the reinforce-ment) of national stereotypes. The result is a changed text: the Italian version of Lost is similar (but not equal) to Lost viewed in the USA (and different once again from the French and German one).
Volunteer communities: Grassroots Italianization
Alongside the professional adaptation and dubbing system, in a convergent culture where ‘old and new media collide’ and where grassroots tactics and corporative strategies continuously adapt to and interfere with each other (Jenkins, 2006b), new practices of translating US TV products, and TV series in particular, for the national audiences emerge. Italianization processes, at least sometimes, can shift from large media institutions to niche fan commu-nities: it is the phenomenon globally known as ‘fansubbing’ (a contraction of ‘fan subtitling’).
each episode and spread this translation through the web. They are direct descendants of the animefans who, in the 1980s and the 1990s, distributed subtitled versions of the Japanese animation products that were not broad-cast at all or were commercialized only in deeply revised and modified ver-sions (Díaz Cintas and Muñoz Sánchez, 2006; Leonard, 2005). Following the massive growth of peer-to-peer networks, file-sharing programs and broadband, these practices have become easier and have widely expanded from the anime subculture, interweaving with other fandoms of single products, specific genres (such as science fiction or fantasy), or American TV series in general (Hills, 2003; Scaglioni, 2006, 2007). No more an instrument to fill a ‘cultural sink’, ‘a void that forms in a culture as a result of intracultural or extracultural flows’ (Leonard, 2005: 283), the fansub-bing moves to popular TV products, and engages a battle not only with geographical distance, but also with ‘official’ programming practices: on one side, the dubbing accused by fan groups of simplifying too much the original semantic complexity; on the other side, the heavy delays in the Italian scheduling of US TV series. Consequently, since the Italian broadcast of Lost’s (dubbed) first season in 2005, individuals and small groups of fans previously involved in grassroots translations, together with several new-comers, coagulated into larger ‘generalist’ communities, aimed at subtitling as soon as possible a large number of products: the two main groups are Subsfactory (http://www.subsfactory.it) and Italian Subs Addicted, or Itasa (http://www.italiansubs.net).6 The ‘collective intelligence’ of a growing
group of fans, applied by Henry Jenkins, starting from Pierre Lévy’s work, to Survivor’s spoiler communities (2006a), attempts here to supply other fans with a service – the ‘loyal’ translation of single episodes – and, conse-quentially, to negotiate ‘official’ textual times – allowing to view the episodes according to US schedule – and meanings – diffusing new practices and conventions. The subs also become the base of a lot of subsequent interpretative work on US TV series, made by fans and fan groups through blogs, forums, wikis, which create other ‘unofficial’ Italian interpretations of the original text.
Lost represented a switch from a ‘niche’ to a sort of ‘mass niche’ (Barra and Guarnaccia, 2008a). Fansubbing, even if rapidly growing and diffusing beyond tech-savvy circles, cannot yet be usefully compared for its significance – and consequences – to the previously described ‘official’ adaptation: while the first involves tens of thousands of highly involved fans, the last concerns several millions of TV viewers. However, bearing in mind the different weights, it is important to analyse the fansubbing Italianization practice for a number of reasons: the peculiar organizational structure developed, through a trial-and-error process, by mature fansubbing; the possibility to compare institutional and grassroots audiovisual translations; the potential – and quite unpredictable – ‘butterfly effects’ (Pérez Gonzalez, 2006) that fansubbing methods can inspire in or produce on the entire translation field.
the work. Subbers decide to participate in these groups because they love American TV series (or some of them), or because they want to practise the English language (many fansubbers are students), or even because they are keen to invest some of their free time in being part of a group, sharing inter-ests and thoughts with peers. However, each community has evolved into a fully-structured organization, in order to optimize the job and manage the growing number of people involved without losing precious time and work quality. So, the spontaneous workforce also comes to deal with defined pro-duction routines, with a hierarchic organization so clear to all participants – the ‘fan career’, completely internal to the community, is based on merit, seniority, time spent in the group’s activities – as that includes recruiting (before joining the community, every fansubber has to pass a translation test) and banning practices (inactive fansubbers are sent off). The classic distinc-tion between ‘enthusiasts’ and ‘petty producers’ (Abercrombie and Longhurst, 1998) becomes here really complex: while the subtitles, fan-produced cultural objects, are freely distributed on the Internet, the community organization gradually comes closer to a marketplace, with subscriptions to pay the server costs, banners and other forms of promotion.
The first step here is ‘video and transcript acquisition’. After an episode has been broadcast over US TV, its video is available in few hours on p2p networks. In the meanwhile, some international (usually, French or Chinese) site prepares the transcript of this episode – a text file with the dialogue lines, taken straight from US teletext pages or from TV audio with the help of a voice recognition software – or directly its English language subtitles. The Italian ‘team manager’ – usually, the ‘subtitle editor’ – looks for the raw video file and the transcript and provides them to the ‘team’, the group of community fansubbers that will work on that specific episode. A high qual-ity of the original text is a necessary start for a good translation, but the tech-nical and semi-automatic nature of the work and the strict working deadlines often force to neglect accuracy, and damage – or slow down – the entire fansubbing process.
The second stage is ‘synching’ or, more often, ‘re-synching’. The transcript has to be transformed into a ‘real’ subtitle, with the right time-codes that make a phrase appear on screen, and then make it fade away. In most cases, the task is reduced to an attentive check of video correspondence to timing with text blocks, and to some changes to visually realign the subs to the Italian community standards. A devoted working figure – the ‘syncher’ (also called the ‘timer’) – deals with a proper PC program and develops specific working skills, such as precision and reflexes: a community member unable or uninterested to translate, but willing to participate and help its group, the syncher does not modify directly the meaning of the text, but contributes fun-damentally to enhance – and ‘naturalize’ – the viewer’s experience.
a ‘simple’ subtitle, as in the case of MetalMarco, one of the Itasa administra-tors, who for an entire season has been able to put his signature in the api-cal point of every Lost episode’s cliffhanger, in order to be easily remembered by the viewers. All these distortions, even if in a slighter way than profes-sional dubbing, can interfere with textual meanings, and have to be taken into account considering the Italian (partial) reception of TV series.
The fourth stage is ‘revision’. Once again, the action returns to the team manager, who at this stage plays a central role: the editor collects the differ-ent translated pieces of the episode subtitle, puts them together and controls each line in order to ensure overall consistency and quality. A first technical revision focuses on typing mistakes, line lengths, synch errors, misshapen text blocks: after some practice, every editor develops some tricks and automa-tisms, which can grant uniformity (and work as a signature). A second logi-cal, and more complex, revision follows: the editor must homogenize and fuse his team’s varied translations, correct incomprehensions and inaccuracies, check that the same word has always been translated in the same way, even-tually contact team members asking for explanations. To subbers’ ideas and idiosyncrasies, at this moment, the editor adds (maybe overlaps) his previous thoughts on the TV series, on his voluntary job, on translation practices, on the public who will use the subtitles: and this, directly or indirectly, influences the final product (the text file containing the subtitles) and – in a more indi-rect way – the whole episode that will be watched through this.
a more important position; and even out-groups and ‘generic’ fans see this constant professionalization as an useful indicator, granting a continuously growing rapidity and translation quality.
Web-based subbing communities are based on free time, passion, friend-ship, fandom experience. But in recent years they have evolved production routines, roles and tasks becoming more and more similar to professional dubbing. Consumers, especially fans, have not only become ‘prosumers’ (or ‘produsers’; Deuze, 2007), but are reaching a semi-professionallevel of spe-cialization and organization, in order to be useful to – offer a qualified ser-vice to, and get in contact with – other consumers and fans. At the same time, fans’ intentions and purposes can remain very far from professionals’ ambi-tion: while the latter have to reach a broader audience, the former can easily be loyal and translate according to an ‘enriched’ involvement and engagement with the TV series, common to fan cultures.
To sum up, a different way of watching the TV series, based prominently on web, forums and peer-to-peer networks, ends up producing a new kind of Italianization. To a certain extent, it presents a structure similar to the professional one, with correspondent tasks, objectives, translation problems and roles involved. However, there remain many differences, mainly attribut-able to different purposes – even conflicting ones: the desire to see the TV series in advance of Italian scheduled broadcast, eventually accepting a lower level of quality; or instead the idea of educating the general audience, often coupled with the crusade against traditional dubbing diffused in niche fan groups, that instead requires a highly loyal translation – and to a different audience – as said, a sort of ‘mass niche’ largely composed by technologically savvy people, and their friends.
Fansubbing reveals to be a new form of co-creational labour, fan (and fun)-based, maybe less invasive than professional Italianization, but – exactly as this – not predicted (or approved) by original authors.
Conclusions
After describing the production routines and the main adaptation problems related to the Italianization process applied to TV series, and generally to audiovisual transfer, it is time to draw some conclusions.
work without a deep focus on cultural and professional practices at play in the destination country, here Italy. The ‘domestication’ of the original text usually takes form through dominant translating and adapting conven-tions that deeply influence and modify the product’s meaning and its recep-tion. Translators’ ‘invisibility and effacement’ (Pérez Gonzales, 2006) reveal themselves as nothing else than a rhetoric instrument, used to hide and cover the ‘natural’ alterations due to voluntary choices – that enforce stereotypes, that endorse the traditional ‘poor’ image of the implied TV audience or an active one – or to the essence of production and organization routines – that simplify the processes through automatisms, auto-censorship or other easy or less easy way-outs. Although the image of the intended public is a constant guide to amateur and professional adaptors, according to the interpretation given, it can lead to very different results: a ‘flattened’ dubbing or an extremely loyal translation, etc.
The co-creative nature of the Italianization process further complicates if we take into account the ties and mirroring between professional and ama-teur adaptations. On one hand, subbers necessarily consider the previ-ous professional dubbing of long-running series: if Lost character Hurley interacts with other people calling them ‘coso’ (‘dude’), fansubbers must take it into account during their translation. On the other hand, professionals sometimes can make a wide, and generally undeclared, use in their job of the subtitles available on the Internet, in a constant shift between the apprecia-tion of semi-professional translaapprecia-tion’s high levels of quality and the exploita-tion of user-generated content freely diffused for commercial purposes (as noted in Deuze, 2007): the fans, who claim that even some of their transla-tion mistakes have been ‘copied’, tend to consider this ‘contributransla-tion’ to pro-fessional routines as an honour, a sign that their work goes far beyond a ‘niche’ collected around a community.
In conclusion, it becomes clear, when studying and analysing global prod-ucts and their national reception, the importance of paying attention to the different kinds of mediator roles – indifferently professional or amateur, as there are so many similarities in production routines and logics: from the con-stant consideration of the implied audience – sometimes not so different between dubbers and subbers, as shown in Itasa’s approach to comedy – to the mediations necessary to translate the cultural references to another culture, from the regular consideration of times and costs that limits some possibilities – as in the deliberate choice of a ‘poor’ translation that can occur in both professional and amateur fields, even if for different reasons – to the complex interaction between ‘Italian’ and ‘US’ meanings.
Acknowledgement
I would like to thank the people that made this article – and the research behind it – possible: Prof. Peppino Ortoleva, who first inspired and guided me into aca-demic research on media history, and convinced me to study Italianization; Prof. Aldo Grasso and Prof. Massimo Scaglioni, who let me continue the investigation and gave me useful advice; Fabio Guarnaccia, who analysed with me the dynam-ics of fansubbing communities; and Elena Cappuccio, for practical indications.
Notes
1 Audience Studies have long focused on broadcasters’ and professionals’ preformed ideas about their public, at least since Ang (1991). Livingstone (1998), for instance, refers to these preconceptions as an ‘implied audience’. 2 The two kinds of rights, for free and pay TV, can lead sometimes to two dif-ferent Italianized versions of a single series (e.g. South Park, dubbed first for free-to-air television and then, in a more loyal – and vulgar – edition, for a thematic channel).
3 Also the parental relationships between the characters have been inexplica-bly changed: Fran’s mother and grandmother became two aunts. It is easy to imagine the complexity to adapt the episodes, especially the Jewish-themed ones, according to these restrictions; while it is not so easy to understand the reasons why the adapters chose such a deep Italianization.
4 In the participant observation made during the Italian dubbing of The Simpsons and described in Barra (2007, 2008), the dubbing director Tonino Accolla (also Homer’s dubber) decided to eliminate the word, present in the original script, in order not to be called back to studio by the network, who schedules The Simpsons in daytime.
5 Scheduling is listed as a final practice for discursive reasons, and to take into account re-runs and eventual timetable shifts. But when a single mediator (i.e. the broadcaster) controls all the Italianization process, often the sched-uling decisions are taken earlier in the process, together with rights acquisi-tion, and may inform dubbing decisions since the very beginning.
6 Both communities involve directly 300 fans in the translation process, dif-fuse the subtitles of nearly 200 TV series and are visited everyday by thou-sands of people willing to download the latest subs (Barra and Guarnaccia, 2008a,b).
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● LUCA BARRAis a PhD candidate in ‘Communication Cultures’ at Università Cattolica del Sacro Cuore, Milan, and junior editor of the TV studies journal Link: Idee per la Televisione.
