Translating culture-specific elements in dubbing: A case study on the series "The Office"

The purpose of this study is to illustrate the processes underlying the language transfer method of dubbing, as well as its implications and constraints, using a peculiar case study related to the American tv series "The Office”, without omitting the difficult passage of cultural elements from a source language to a target language, which in our case are to be identified with English and Italian respectively. On a structural level, the work is divided into three chapters. The first one opens with a brief introduction to the world of audiovisual translation, covering not only dubbing but also other methods such as subtitling, having care to clarify the differences between adequacy and acceptability. The dissertation continues with a second chapter devoted to the difficulty of translating cultural elements from one language to another; in particular, the humorous elements (which hold a monopoly position among all the cultural elements in the source text of “The Office”) are examined. More precisely, figurative language, cultural references and the humorous aspect are the main objects of analysis in this paper, insofar as they serve as an introduction to the next and final step of the thesis. In the wake of what has been explained so far, the dissertation directs its attention towards the presentation of “The Office” series, and then identifies a qualitative analysis and a quantitative one, both of which animate the third chapter. The linguistic analysis is then followed by the conclusions, which aim to take the stock of everything dealt in the present study and shed light on possible alternatives to the Italian dubbing script of the series.