Translating stereotypes: Italian television and the cultural politics of reformatting

The dissertation analyzes the processes and implications of the translation and dubbing of contemporary American television series for Italian audiences and reexamines the widely accepted (but also increasingly criticized) concept of globalization as a primarily homogenizing force. In doing so, this study moves away from the more traditional---and still dominant---point of view of "media flows" from the exporting countries, in order to analyze the processes of "indigenization" at play in the importing countries. In this respect, the research addresses television translation as an industrial and creative narrative practice closely related to issues of national and cultural identity. In particular, I analyze the formation of "national televisual communities" through the study of dubbed TV series and the consequent processes of "indigenization" of texts in a new national context for new national audiences. Specifically, my case study focuses on the changes made to three American TV series (The Nanny, The Simpsons, and The Sopranos) imported to Italian television, and examines the reasons these modifications were considered necessary. In this regard. I examine dubbing not just as an industrial imperative, but as a form of cultural ventriloquism as well. To do this, I consider audiovisual translation as entailing complex cross-cultural institutional and creative processes, making translation something fully implicated in the creation of "new" and "indigenized" texts. In this context, the concepts of indigenization, localization, and domestication refer to those specific industrial and cultural practices aimed at re-purposing television texts for new audiences. This study, in fact, focuses on the efforts made by dubbing practitioners in Italy to re-write---and therefore re-create---television texts in translation, on the basis of accepted stereotypical notions of what is "indigenous," "local," and "domestic." Accepting as valid the premise that the bottom-line goal of this "targeted-translation" is economic profit, the dissertation ultimately demonstrates how media, and in particular television, have learned to manage, exploit, transform, and adapt cultural specificity as a fundamental industrial practice and proven business strategy in the era of global media commerce.