Voicing diversity? Negotiating Italian identity through voice-over translation in BBC broadcasting

ABSTRACT

This contribution focuses on voice-over translation as a form of intercultural communication. The pilot study discussed here aims to investigate the role of voice-over techniques such as revoicing, narration and simultaneous interpreting in negotiating Italian cultural identity in non-fiction BBC broadcasts. The study is divided into five parts. The theoretical perspectives underpinning the research, narrative theory, imagology and critical discourse analysis are introduced in the first sections. An overview of the literature on voice-over translation follows in section two, while sections three, four and five present the analyses of three mini case studies spanning three non-fiction genres. The contribution concludes with some tentative observations and directions for further research.

KEYWORDS:

• voice-over translation
• cultural stereotyping
• translation in the media

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author.

Notes on contributor

Denise Filmer is a postdoctoral research fellow at the University of Catania's department of Foreign Languages and Literatures, where she also teaches English language and translation. Her current research investigates issues of cultural and linguistic mediation in the refugee crisis the semantic shifts and the language of immigration in news discourse, audiovisual translation and ideological manipulation. She holds a PhD and an MA by research in translation studies from Durham University (UK).

Notes

1. A simple keyword search on Google Scholar produces the following results:

18,000+ Google Scholar subtitling;19,800+ Google Scholar dubbing;496 voice-over translation, the vast majority of which regard VOIP (voice-over internet protocol), and not voice-over translation at all.

2. Audiovisual translation in any form is relatively rare in mainstream British broadcasting. Subtitling is used for the few foreign TV series that are aired, for example Inspector Montalbano, while voice-over tends to be used in the context of non-fiction programmes. Those that are specifically voiced-over in Italian are very scarce. In sum, it would be difficult to find other examples of Italian voice-over on British broadcasting, apart from one other travelogue, Gino’s Italy, a pale imitation of Sicily and Italy Unpacked. It seems unlikely this would bring anything new to the discussion at hand except to emphasise Italian stereotyping, which for the purposes of this study is necessarily across genres.