The Acting Translator: Embodying Cultures in the Dubbing Translation of American Sitcoms.

This book introduces a fresh perspective on the dubbing translation of a humorous audiovisual genre, the sitcom, by presenting the innovative Cognitive-Experientialist Model of the Acting Translator and its principled applications to translation practice. The book argues that to achieve a total experience of a sitcom, dubbing translators need to ‘embody’ the characters and ‘inhabit’ sitcom situations within a ‘physical space of representation’ where they can at first improvise and, then, reflect on the incongruous patterns of humour, typical of this sitcom genre, so as to produce ‘in action’ pragmatically equivalent versions in the target language. In this way, they become ‘acting translators’ who encompass all the roles involved in the dubbing-translation process: the linguist, the actor, the translator, the script adaptor, the dubbing actor, and the dubbing director. The Model is then applied to the conversation analysis of a number of scripts from five American sitcoms (The Nanny, Roseanne, Dharma & Greg, Friends, and Will & Grace) in both source and target languages, thereby giving evidence of the translation shortcomings identified in the dubbed versions for Italian television by comparing them with the more pragmatically equivalent versions provided by university students/acting-translators, whose translation choices represent indeed instances of ‘product naturalization’ which retain the spontaneity of Italian conversational styles.