Cultural References in Animated Films: A Diachronic Analysis of Disney's and Pixar's Movies

This dissertation delves into audiovisual translation, which is a specialised branch of translation studies dealing with the translation, adaptation, and localisation of audiovisual products – e.g. films, animation products, TV programmes, documentaries, interviews, news broadcasts, theatrical performances, videos, and web pages. More specifically, it focuses on the translation and adaptation of culture-specific references in the dubbing of Disney’s and Disney-Pixar’s animated films from English into Italian. Its main goal is to provide a diachronic analysis of the translation strategies adopted by Italian translators when adapting culture-specific references from the selected animated films and to detect tendencies, trends, or norms, if any, that could have influenced their work. The diachronic analysis is conducted on a corpus of nearly thirty different Disney’s and Disney-Pixar’s animated films released from the 1950s to the present day. The culture-specific references found in the selected animated films have been collected in a table with the aid of actual film viewing, subtitles, and film transcripts and classified according to both Ranzato’s (2016) and Díaz Cintas and Remael’s (2007) taxonomies. These were chosen because Ranzato’s (2016) classification describes the relationship between source and target culture, which is key element in this research given the variety of cultures involved in the animated films, while Díaz Cintas and Remael’s (2007) categorisation identifies lexical items in a very detailed, yet simple and straightforward manner. The translation strategies, instead, have been analysed with the aim of Ranzato’s (2016) taxonomy, which subsumes eleven categories and is based on work by Díaz Cintas and Remael (2007), who developed a taxonomy for subtitling, which Ranzato adapted for dubbing purposes. Chapter 1 initially provides a general overview of what audiovisual translation and screen translation are. Secondly, it illustrates the different types of audiovisual translation and screen translation and furthers dubbing practice by describing the translation process in dubbing and the translation strategies needed to adapt to dubbing constraints. Chapter 2 revolves around one specific dubbing constraint, culture-specific references, which are defined and classified at the end of the chapter according to Ranzato’s (2016) and Díaz Cintas and Remael’s (2007) taxonomies. Furthermore, the strategies for the translation of culture-specific references in audiovisual products are listed under Ranzato’s (2016) eleven categories. Finally, Chapter 3 offers a diachronic analysis of the translation strategies adopted by Italian translators when adapting culture-specific references in the dubbing of Disney’s and Disney-Pixar’s animated films from English into Italian. To be more precise, their adaptation has been compared in Disney’s and Disney-Pixar’s animated films of the 20th and 21st centuries. In the chapter, multiple examples of different types of culture-specific references have been taken into consideration, including accents and stereotypes, food references, historical and geographical references, and the matter of humour. They have been presented in different tables that compare the original film dialogues with the respective Italian adaptations. Each one of them has been analysed singularly, and, in particular, each translation strategy adopted by Italian translators has been recognised and classified according to Ranzato’s (2016) taxonomy. The concluding remarks also point out whether there are any tendencies, trends, or norms in the Italian adaptors’ work.