Multilingual humour in audiovisual translation. Modern Family dubbed in Italian

Abstract

Audiovisual productions are increasingly featuring multi-ethnic communities which also reflect today’s globalised world. Characters in both films and TV series are often depicted as having a bilingual background and heavily relying on code-switching to express their bicultural identity (Monti 2016: 69). As such, this phenomenon poses important challenges for its translation, especially when dubbing is involved. Using this audiovisual translation (AVT) mode involves a necessary technical manipulation(Díaz-Cintas 2012: 284-285). As for Italian dubbing, multilingualism has often undergone a process of neutralization (Pavesi 2005: 56) or local standardization (Ulrych 2000: 410), although recent dubbed films have proved to be geared towards a more faithful rendering of this important feature of the source text (Monti 2016: 90).It should be borne in mind that contextual factors, such as genres, may play a fundamental role in deciding whether to retain or neutralise multilingualism in AVT, especially when it is used for humorous purposes. In those cases, the perlocutionary function of the ST should be considered (Hickey 1998; cf. also Zabalbeascoa 2012: 322). Comedy can make use of multilingualism to entertain and the American mockumentary (or docucomedy) Modern Family(Christopher Lloyd and Steven Levitan, 2009-2019), is a striking example in this sense. It follows the lives of Jay Pritchett and his family in suburban Los Angeles. Linguistically speaking, the most interesting character is Jay’s second wife Gloria Delgado, a young and beautiful Colombian woman who often code-switches or code-mixes English and Spanish (with a marked Colombian accent), thus creating moments of pure comedy. Hence, this study investigates how Gloria’s humorous and multilingual persona has been transferred into Italian. The analysis confirms the current tendency of Italian dubbing to render otherness in the TT (Monti 2016: 89). This may be justified by the genre and scope of the programme, that allow for a more innovative transfer of vernacular matching via what I propose to call functional manipulation.

Multilingual humour in audiovisual translation

“…After analysing the seven examples proposed by Dore (2019) in her article about multilingual humour in the Italian dubbed version of Modern Family, we have detected some similarities and differences in the Spanish dubbed version of the same series and scenes.…”

“…This article aims to take up the gauntlet thrown down by Dore (2019) with her article published by this Journal in which she expressed her hope "that this work [could] foster future comparative analysis of the dubbed and subtitled version(s) of Modern Family in Italian and/or other languages" (2019: 67). It is therefore interesting to analyse the same examples the abovementioned scholar proposed in her article in order to confirm the tendency adopted when dubbing multilingual audiovisual texts into Spanish.…”

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This commentary aims to take up the gauntlet thrown down by Dore (2019) with her article about multilingual humour in the Italian dubbed version of the series Modern Family. She suggested that the scenes included in the article could be analysed in other languages, so it was an interesting proposal to carry out the analysis of the Spanish dubbed version, since the L2 in the source text coincides with the target text language.

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Translating Foreign Languages and Non-Native Varieties of English in Animated Films

“…Research on linguistic variation and multilingualism in audiovisual translation has flourished in the last 15 years with conferences, research projects (the TraFilm Project, the PluriTAV Project), articles, book chapters, books and journal issues being devoted to this topic. Several publications look specifically at the translation of linguistic variation and heterolingualism in dubbing and subtitling, focussing on various genres from different perspectives (Beseghi 2017(Beseghi , 2019Chiaro 2007Chiaro , 2008Chiaro , 2009Corrius, Espasa, and Zabalbeascoa 2019;Zabalbeascoa 2011, 2019;De Bonis 2014a and2014b;De Higes Andino 2014;Díaz-Cintas 2011;Dore 2019 and2020;Ellender 2015;Heiss 2004Heiss , 2014Monti 2009Monti , 2016 Corrius, Espasa, and Zabalbeascoa (2019).…”

Audiovisual translation of puns in animated films: strategies and procedures

“…Gottlieb 1997b: 226;Schröter 2010: 142-143). Both studies, based on different language pairs and type of worksthat is, literary (see, e.g., Delabastita 1997;Veisbergs 1997;Henry 2003;Low 2011;Vandaele 2011;Chiaro 2017) and audiovisual (see, e.g., Gottlieb 1997b;Pisek 1997;Schröter 2005Schröter , 2010Dore 2010Dore , 2019Schauffler 2015;De los Reyes Lozano 2017;López González 2017) -reflect different approaches to the issue.…”