Translating Italian into Italian | A Case Study: The Italian dubbing of The Simpsons

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Written by Valeria Monello

Abstract

An audiovisual text is a multisemiotic system in which different codes operate simultaneously in the production of meaning: written code, oral code and visual code have to be recreated in the target language provided that they respect the limitations imposed by the visual constraints (the space limits on the screen in case of subtitling or synchronization). The impossibility of making use of the most common translation aids (footnotes, glossaries etc.), the political, social and economic powers influencing the rewriting process, synchronization issues and the function of a text are relevant factors to be dealt with especially when audiovisual products are humorous.

Through a descriptive approach, the present paper focuses on the strategies that the Italian translators of The Simpsons have adopted for dealing with the so-called third language (Chaume, 2012: 132) in two selected episodes, namely The Last of the Red Hat Mamas (GABF22, episode n° 7, 17th series), and The Italian Bob(HABF02, episode n° 8, 17th series). The contrastive analysis of the two episodes proposed here will offer evidence of the connotations the dubbing has taken into consideration in order to appeal to the new audience and make distinction between the target language and the Italian of the original.

1. The Simpsons: Humour and Stereotypes

The American cartoon, broadcast for the first time in the USA in 1989, with its autoreferential and allusive narrative construction, which blends high and low culture, intertextual and hypertextual travels, quotations, parody, hyperrealism, hyperirony, pastiche and satire, is known in the world as one of the most intelligent and creative examples of postmodern art. (Turner, 2004). Notwithstanding the numerous references to pop culture, American history and politics, the success of the Simpson family lies in its universality, linguistically emphasised by the total lack of diatopic and diastratic variations in the idiolects of its members[1]. The linguistic styles of all the family members are reproduced (under the strict supervision of the producers of the show) almost identically all over the world; they speak without an accent because they represent any American family[2]. In fact, Springfield[3], the omnitopia where the family lives, has a fluctuating and unknown position that is not easily recognisable by a corresponding accent. Therefore, others are the features of speech (mainly suprasegmental traits) expressing our protagonists' personalities. For instance, Homer's pharyngeal dumb voice and slow speech rate perfectly convey his rather limited intelligence. Marge, instead, is often and understandably nervous and frustrated, and her hoarse voice transfers successfully across languages her harassed condition (Armstrong, 2004: 106-107).

In addition to the main family characters, The Simpsons boasts a high number of minor characters who ensure the longevity of the show by providing infinite cues for the development of alternative narratives. Most of these secondary characters are references to real or fictional characters developed from already established stereotypes and represented through their national, racial and ethnic characteristics, which usually trigger recurrent jokes.

The cartoon’s oversimplistic portrayal of “otherness”, far from being offensive, works as a satirical comment on the insular nature of American society^[4]. According to Duncan Beard, The Simpsons is “oppositional because of its ironic use of pre-existing mass-media stereotypes precisely in order to destabilize them.”(2004: 273). And satire permeates the streets of Springfield itself, where

Absurdly broad stereotypes coexist with the town's more realistic details. This is a town, after all, whose Irish inhabitants are essentially leprechauns and whose Italian restaurant is run by a fellow named Luigi who is, if anything, a broader stereotype than Chef Boyardee (Turner, 2004: 326)

As Teer-Tomaselli points out, humour depends on identity: character types such as the headmaster, the Indian-born proprietor of the convenient store, the Italian restaurant owner, the clerk with the pimpled face, the nerd and so on, are extremely funny because they are part of our collective imagination, and, consequently, immediately recognisable to the audience (1994: 54). The fact that the conventional characters of the show are immediately recognisable to the American audience as consciously intended stereotypes, constitutes their very possibility to function as a kind of Brechtian TV show, preventing its viewers from identifying with the characters so that they can continue to evaluate the ideological content on the screen (Wallace 2008: 268-269).

The show's hatred for authority, capitalism and politics is evident from the way in which the characters who symbolize these powers are linguistically represented. Mr Burns,the local tycoon and symbol of unscrupulous capitalism, is the typical villain. His wickedness is indexed by an upper-class US New England accent. The authors have resorted to an Anglicised Bostonian hyperlect[5], which purposely recalls the speech of John F. Kennedy or the clan members in general, to voice Womanizer Mayor Quimby, who symbolizes the corrupt and cunning political class (Armstrong, 2004: 104). Villainous Sideshow Bob, Bart's sophisticated nemesis, also speaks with a British accent[6]. The use of a dialect to typify a social class in adaptation is a very economical and dangerous device that immediately conjures up certain connotations associated with a particular social class or ethnicity. It inevitably poses serious translating problems in that the connotations of an accent or dialect vary from countries to countries. For instance, the Italian perception of the aforementioned Anglicized accent representing Sideshow Bob, Burns and Quimby as negative characters, is not as detrimental as to the American audience. On the contrary, the accent bestows such a sense of elegance, refinement and accuracy that the Italian dubbers had to draw on highbrow register and old-fashioned and affected expressions to instill the same feeling in the Italian audience.

1. 2 Italian Dubbing

Every nation, when selecting its own translating approach to the text (dubbing, subtitling or no translation at all), is claiming its own cultural discourse and deciding whether to accept the intrinsic elements of the original discourse, or to build on them a completely new kind of discourse[7]. When adapted, a movie ceases to be “foreign” [8] and becomes part of a nation polysystem where characters are uttering an appropriated, manipulated and recreated new text (1997: 33-40)[9]. Among the external forces influencing the multi-step process of translation, the function and genre of an audiovisual text are probably some of the most relevant factors to be taken into account.

For instance, given the widely recognised difficulty of transposing marked varieties, a very common technique in dubbing consists in bridging the linguistic gap between characters and in flattening these varieties towards a standard. Linguistic cleaning, standardization and neutralization are usually preferred to non-standard varieties. As Taylor (2006: 39) points out, film dubbing often signals a shift from the more specific to the more generic “in that lexis, terminology and expressions specific to regional and social varieties need to be generalised in order to guarantee comprehension over wide geographical and social divides”[10].

However, certain genres, such as comedy and light-hearted films, seem to resist standardization by drawing on linguistic variations with a clear entertaining function (Chiaro: 2010). Very often, comic effects are obtained by locative means (culture-bound references, regional dialects and accents) that make people laugh by establishing certain interpersonal relationships^[11].

In that eventuality, the language used does not mirror linguistic varieties effectively spoken, but it is a conventional language that abundantly exploits clichés and stereotypes with respect to cinematic tradition (Pavesi, 2005: 38). Moreover, as Ferrari points out, the adaptation of the locative function in a new national context and perspective, may allow a specific and cultural sense of humour (based on traditional stereotypes and national idiosyncrasies) to be explored, reinforced and easily recognised by the target audience. One strinking example is The Italian dubbing of The Nanny, an American television sitcom whose protagonist, a Jewish Queens native, casually becomes the nanny of three children from the New York/British upper class. La Tata represents a very unique case study “in that the adaptation drastically changes the originally US stereotypes and re-constructs the ethnic and linguistic elements in a new “all-Italian” light, modifying culturally specific situations into a new set of national jokes and ironies” (2006: 131)^[12].

The Italian translation of The Simpsonsalso follows the trend by relocating most of the cultural allusions to a new national context, and re-territorializing the characters according to domestic stereotypes while the scene is still set in Springfield. The fact that Italian audience not only has tolerated this incongruity, but also has warmly welcomed the show, is representative of what Italian people think is humorous. While the original US voiceovers tend to play more with the tone of the characters' voices that often sound like famous actors’, Italian humour has been exploiting regional accents and dialects since the Commedia dell' Arte (Baccolini et Al., 1994: 67-68). Its grotesque characters, wearing masks and speaking dialects from different Italian areas, still represent a source for humour that appeals to Italian viewers and readers.[13]For instance, the choice of a Sardinian stereotype for Groundskeeper Willie, a surly character, whose Scottishness is underlined by both his appearance (he often wears a kilt) and his accent, was due to the completely different connotation that the Scottish stereotype has in Italy. Extraordinarily, Scottish and Sardinian share certain surprising prosodic isoglosses and are both perceived as harsh and incomprehensible to the rest of the community in which they are used. (Ferrari, 2010: 114-118).

As a further confirmation of the strong Italian appreciation for dialects, the idiolects of two minor characters speaking American English, Reverend Lovejoy and Police Chief Clancy Wiggum (in Italian Clancy Winchester), have been recreated according to the Italian stereotype of churchmen and policemen as Southerners (Reverend Lovejoy has a Calabrian accent and Wiggum/Winchester a Neapolitan one). However, other times stereotypes are subverted. For example, Otto Disc (in English Otto Mann), the school bus driver, whose original voice is distorted by cannabis assumption, contradicts the connotation associated with a Milanese accent[14] and Carl Carlson, Homer's colleague at the nuclear plant, displays a strong Venetian accent that “clashes” with his African-American appearance.[15]

The Italian dubbed version plays with stereotypes quite often reaffirming them, as in the case of Apu Nahasapeemapetilon, the Indian proprietor of the 24 hour-convenience store who, in the source audiovisual text, speaks proper English with a marked Indian accent. His Italian complies with the stereotypical perception that Italian people have of immigrants speaking Italian: a scrambled syntax[16], many grammatical errors, a strong accent and a singsong intonation mark him as the typical immigrant who will never really master the national language (Ferrari, 2010: 120-121).  In the table below, a Chinese woman’s perfect English (with a slight Chinese accent in the original) becomes nationally enjoyable (to the Italian audience) for its inability to distinguish between “l” and “r”:

Foreigners and Southerners (Sicilians in particular) share the same linguistic representation: the historical inequalities between Northern and Southern Italy have imbued comical and stereotypical representations of Southerners as ignorant, crooks and unable to master their “second language”, Italian. Mastering the national language represents a watershed in cultural and national identity and the only key to integration. It is not by chance that the stereotypical depiction of “others” passes through their incapacity of speaking proper Italian without regional expressions and inflections. This linguistic issue perpetuates the idea of the inferiority of immigrants and Southern Italians as compared respectively to native and Northerner Italians. The episode titled Trilogy of Error (CABF14, 18th episode, 12th series) provides a pertinent example. In the extract, Linguo, the grammar-correcting robot that Lisa has created for the school science fair, falls into Springfield gangsters' hands:

The scene of the explosion (the robot explodes because of the gangsters’ bad grammar) celebrates Italian-Americans’ and Sicilians’ linguistic incompetence and “foreignness”. The association between Italian-American accent and Sicilian dialect relies on the fact that both variations divert from the standard conjuring up a very similar negative connotation.

1.3 Translating Italian into Italian

Specific regional and local expressions often represent a hard obstacle to deal with in terms of translation. The issue becomes even more complicated when an audiovisual text contains dialogues in the so-called third language, the first language being the main language of the original, and the second language the dubbing language (Chaume, 2012: 132). The contrastive analysis of the two episodes proposed here will offer evidence of the connotations the adaptation takes into consideration and applies in order to appeal to the new audience and make distinction between the target language and the Italian of the original.

The first episode analysed is The Red Hat Mamas[17]. It offers several examples of how deeply rooted the stereotypes depicting Italian-Americans as mobsters are, and contains a pseudo-realistic Italian as the third language:

Translating Italian-American accent and Italian into Sicilian dialect has been common practice since the first dubbing of American gangster movies like The Godfather (1972) and Scorsese's Goodfellas. It is still considered a valid solution for dealing with marked varieties, as the more recent The Sopranos(Paolinelli, Di Fortunato, 2005: 19) shows. This association is so deeply-rooted that Stephen Sartarelli, the American translator of Camilleri’s detective novels, has recreated Catarella’s idiolect by drawing on Italian-American accent, specifically on Brooklynese (Monello, 2016).

The second extract from the same episode features Italian as the third language. The plot is quite simple: Lisa wants to learn Italian and resorts to Milhouse’s (Bart’s best friend) unexpected fluency in Italian. Riding on a Vespa like Gregory Peck in Roman Holiday and dressed like Don Fanucci[18], Milhouse starts his first Italian class with Lisa in a hyperrealistic[19] Little Italy where stereotypical Italian characters, who belong to cinematic imaginary (the fat dishevelled man at the window, the dark-haired, gypsy-like woman and Luigi, the Italian cook from Lady and the Tramp), live.

The cinematic Italianness of the Italian-American characters, indexed by well-known Italian words like “ciao” (hi), “come stai” (how are you?), “gelato” (ice cream), “bella ragazza” (beautiful girl), is regionalised in the old Sicilian expression “Baciamo le mani” (hand-kissing) and in the Neapolitan dialect spoken by Luigi, the pizza chef par excellence. The locative specification about Luigi’s place of origin, Pozzuoli, is probably a displaced compensation for the Italian-American “atta da home”. The incorrect Italian spoken in the original, where “nuova” in “che cosa di nuova” (what’s new) erroneously agrees with “cosa” (what), is followed by other examples contained in the extract below:

Lisa's jealous bluster at Milhouse in Italian sounds like a back-translation from English and the pronunciation of “idiota” (idiot) as “idioto”, and “grazie” (thank you) as “grazi”, seems to prove that Italian was just forged to give a taste of exotic and not for realistic purposes. Both the original and the dubbed version play upon the stereotypical representation of Italian (in the original) and Sicilian women (in the Italian dubbing) as extremely jealous and aggressive. Moreover, the Italian episode underlines this well-rooted stereotype through Lisa’s list of some of the most vindictive and dangerous women in ancient history (Cleopatra, Circe and Messalina).

As previously seen, Le allegre comari di Rossor has “nationalised” the gap between two languages (in the original, between American English and Italian) into a clash between Italian and Sicilian dialect. In order to convince the target receiver, the translators have opted for some narrative modifications to the overall plot. In the original plot, Lisa has to be fluent in Italian to go to a summer school in Rome. In the dubbed version, the pre-requisite for attending the course is a good knowledge of the ancient history of Rome. Moreover, in order to justify the fact that he will teach ancient history mainly in Sicilian dialect, and the visual constraints showing a typical Tuscan landscapes, Milhouse explains that his grandmother, Nana Sophie, lives in Tuscany even if she is Sicilian. These adjustments have permitted the translators to recreate that linguistic clash which constitutes most of the humour of the episode. The underlined sentences show how the plot has been changed:

The Latin-sounding sentence of the translation was probably meant to give a taste of Ancient Rome and was not selected for its relevance to the text. The translation of “she hated English because a G. I. left her with a child” into “sapeva l'inglese perchè un soldato l'aveva messa incinta di mio zio bastardo” (she could speak English because a soldier got her pregnant with my bastard uncle) adds more details to the story still confirming the refusal and hatred towards the languages of the foreigner invader: English and Italian. In the dubbed cartoon, Italian is prohibited by Milhouse's granmother because it is perceived as a foreign language, while Sicilian dialect is perceived as the real first language.

In a flashback on his summer holidays in Tuscany, Milhouse recalls how he learnt Italian (and  Sicilian dialect):

It is easy to note how the Italian spoken in the original has nothing to do with real Italian: mistakes in both pronunciation and morphology, such as “oliva” (in English olive) instead of “olive” (olives), and lack of agreement (Questi sono delle oliva) characterise the dialogue. Successful, in my opinion, the translation of “insegnante” into “mentore”, a high register and formal word for “teacher” which perfectly suits a class on the history of Rome.

 In the second episode analysed, The Italian Bob, the story, set in the imaginary Tuscan village of Salsiccia (Sausage), exploits some of the most common stereotypes related to Italy: food, opera and mafia are constantly evoked and the imprecise and incorrect Italian spoken in the American episode voices this stereotypical “Italianness”. As in the previous episode analysed, here again the Italian characters on the scene are representations of representations: the old woman of the Tuscan village is black-clad^[27], men are dressed like figures from a Salvator Rosa painting and Francesca, Sideshow Bob's Italian wife, looks like Esmeralda, the gypsy beauty from the Walt Disney movie The Hunchback of Notre Dame. In the scene below Homer speaks to an old Tuscan woman:

The dubbed version provides the old woman with an “authentic” and realistic Tuscan accent by means of “gorgia toscana” (miha, Amerihano). Modifications (car knowledge in the place of the competence in English) were necessary for signalling the difference between Italian as the dubbing language, and Italian as the third language. Expressions in pseudo-Italian like “Escusi” instead of “Scusi” (Excuse me), a middle way between Italian and Spanish, “il mayore” instead of “il sindaco” (the mayor) and “la inglese” as the feminine adjective of the left out “la lingua” (the language), were not aimed at recreating real Italian utterances but only the connotations associated with their sound and rhythm.

Unfortunately, the Italian dubbing fails to transfer the humour of the first dialogue between Homer and the old woman. Homer's Italian answer to the old woman’s question (Ehm Americano?) weakens the humorous and satirical energy of the original. Homer’s linguistic imperialism (English is the only language worth knowing in the world) is toned down into a matter of correct and standard Italian pronunciation.

1.4 Conclusions

As Chaume points out, cartoons lie at one end of the foreignization-domestication continuum and “extremely domesticating translation solutions are found and even preferred in an attempt to bring the product closer to the young audience” (2012: 146). The Simpsons, as a cartoon, has a clear entertaining function but like many American TV shows, displays a strong satirical aim that makes it widely appreciated by adults. In my opinion, the presence of these two functions deserves two translating strategies. The numerous references to pop culture, American history and politics aimed at satirizing American society in all its aspects, require a foreignising translation. The varied community of Springfield, made up of minor characters to whom stereotypical ethnic and linguistic features are associated, calls for domesticating strategies in the target languages and culture.

Nothwithstanding the long-established tendency of the Italian media to resort to regional dialects to fulfil the comic function, this specific case study wants to prove that, relocating American stereotypes on Italy in the Italian context, by drawing on representations of Southernes as crooks, ignorant and second-language speakers, was not meant to reinforce such stereotypes. On the contrary, this choice signals the Italian translators’ compliance with the cartoon’s satirical purposes. The Simpsons and, consequently, I Simpson, by boosting overly simplistic stereotypes, make fun of the insular nature of American and Italian societies, even at the risk of creating grotesque and flat characters who, in truth, perfectly match the hyperrealism of the cartoon.

Works cited

Episodes

-The Last of the Red Hat Mamas episode n° 7, 17th series, (GABF22)

-Le allegre comari di Rossor (Italian episode)

-The Italian Bob episode n° 8, 17th series, (HABF02)

-L'Italiano Bob (Italian episode)

-Trilogy of Error, episode n° 18, 12^th series (CABF14)

-Trilogia di una giornata, (Italian episode)

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