Professor Joe Brincat and Dr Giselle Spiteri Miggiani of the Faculty of Arts held a seminar at the Università di Roma La Sapienza on the dubbing of films. Professor Brincat examined some of the strategies a dubbing scriptwriter resorts to when translating films that are created in British locations that are very typical and unfamiliar to the Italian viewer.
A Fond Kiss (Ken Loach, 2004) and The Queen (Stephen Frears, 2006) aim to convey a realistic picture of the situations in which people live and face their everyday or special problems, and consequently language plays a very important role in portraying the characters and their milieux (multicultural Glasgow and the Royal Family).
The British public is fully aware of the linguistic class codes, and expects to hear the appropriate pronunciation, grammar and vocabulary in a film. Consequently, comparing the original dialogue with the dubbed version reveals that the Italian dialogue is marked by overall standardisation and clarity, with the result that the viewer will concentrate on what is being said rather than on how it is being said.
In the second part of the seminar Dr Giselle Spiteri Miggiani explored the dubbing process from a practitioner’s perspective. Thanks to her experience as a a dubbing translator and dialogue writer for productions broadcast on Rai, Mediaset and Sky TV channels, she illustrated what happens in the recording studios and described the adaptation phase of a script, its various constraints and the way in which these have an impact on the dubbed target language. Technical hurdles must be overcome to create the illusion that the foreign actors on screen are reciting in Italian.