Cultural transfer in AVT

My presentation tackles the particular complexity of both theoretical and practical issues raised by cultural concepts in AVT. The problems inherent in all translations are at their most evident when translating and adapting a text for the screen, where the obstacles posed by the issue of ‘unshared knowledge ’between SL and TL audiences are in fact often made challenging by the technical restrictions imposed by the medium. The main theoretical and practical problems faced by screen translation of both language-specific features (i.e., alliterations, idioms, wordplays, proverbs, songs, dialects etc.) and ‘extralinguistic cultural references’ (ECRs) (Pedersen 2007) - referring to entities outside language, such as names of people, places, institutions, food, customs etc., and also including visual cultural specificity such as body language, images, symbols, etc. will be discussed by referring to qualitative examples of the subtitled/dubbed Italian version of well-known English films/TV series. A major focus will be on the rendering of geographically connotated language varieties, which is one of the most productive objects of research today in AVT. On the one hand, the spoken and colloquial varieties are often a narrative device and tool for developing characters, an integral part of their identities; on the other hand, dialects constitute a significant barrier to interlingual transfer. In AVT the rendering of linguistic features of dialects can be highly problematic so translators generally tend to opt for a no-dialect policy. Varieties of language in source texts are generally translated into standard target language where accents and dialectal expressions/ dialects are almost never rendered. As a consequence, elements of social classes, geographical variations, and relationship among characters are flattened/ neutralized, which undercuts the specificity of their voice(s). Additionally, such a no-dialect policy also prompts new questions about how the global cultures of reception are gendered. Examples of the conservative approach (Berezowski 1997) adopted in ‘The Brilliant Friend’ TV series -the recent television adaptation of Elena Ferrante’s hugely successful Neapolitan Novels – will be discussed.