Professional and amateur AVT. The Italian dubbing, subtitling and fansubbing of The Handmaid’s Tale

ABSTRACT

Nowadays, digitalisation has an enormous impact on the way multimedia content is created and conveyed. It affects the intra-, interlingual and intercultural transfer of audiovisual products, which can be enjoyed dubbed, subtitled, voiced over etc. Most importantly, technology has facilitated the spread of phenomena such as fansubbing and fandubbing across the world. Hence, this study seeks to assess the impact of the current fast-changing mediascape on traditional and new AVT modes. To this end, we analyse the first two seasons of the North American TV series The Handmaid’s Tale (Bruce Miller, 2017-) in their Italian dubbed, subtitled and (ItaSA) funsubbed versions. A preliminary investigation of the dubbed and subtitled versions shows that the latter is an intralingual (condensed) version of the former (a.k.a. dubtitles), which is an unusual practice in Italy. Interviews with the dubbing company and the subtitlers attempted to explain the rationale behind this. Furthermore, the textual examination of the different treatment of religious references, text-internal references, and coarse language in the dubbed/subtitled and the fansubbed versions of this series shows the fluidity of professional and amateur AVT, which appear to intersect within today’s ever-changing mediascape.

KEYWORDS:

• Dubtitles
• religious references
• coarse language
• text-internal references
• The Handmaid’s Tale

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author(s).

Correction Statement

This article has been republished with minor changes. These changes do not impact the academic content of the article.

Notes

1 The ItaSa’s site is still accessible, https://www.italiansubs.net. We managed to download their subtitles when they were still available. The documentary Subs Heroes is available at http://www.subsheroes.com (accessed: 15/07/2021). Other fansubbing communities such as Subsfactory and Traduttori Anonimi (Anonymous Translators) also stopped their activities and, even if their Facebook pages are still accessible, little or nothing has been posted since 2019. The Instagram page of Subsfactory appears to be regularly updated but it only offers general information about upcoming TV series and new digital platforms. It is therefore unlikely that contacting the members or revisers of these communities would result in more insight in their work than what already provided by Massidda (2015) and Massidda and Casarini (2017). Although the research was carried out jointly by the two authors, Margherita Dore wrote sections 1, 2, and 4; Angelica Petrucci wrote section 3.

2 For a summary of the many achievements of this series so far, cf. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Handmaid%27s_Tale_(TV_series); we are aware that Wikipedia cannot be considered an entirely reliable source of information. However, we use it here to give a general idea of this series’ success.

3 The series is now also available on Amazon Prime, but no information about the Italian dubbing or subtitling is provided.

4 Cf. https://sourceforge.net/p/visualsubsync/wiki/Home/ (accessed: 15/07/2021).

5 We used https://www.biblegateway.com to establish what bible version was chosen for each individual instance of bible verse quoted in the series (accessed: 15/07/2021).

Additional information

Notes on contributors

Margherita Dore

Margherita Dore is Associate Professor at the University of Rome ‘La Sapienza’, Italy. She is the author of Humour in Audiovisual Translation. Theories and Applications (Routledge, 2019). She edited one essay collection on translation practice (Achieving Consilience. Translation Theories and Practice, Cambridge Scholars Publisher, 2016), a special issue of Status Quaestionis on audiovisual retranslation (2018), one special issue of the European Journal of Humour Research on multilingual humour and translation (2019) and (with Klaus Geyer) a special issue of InTRAlinea on dialect, translation and multimedia. She (co)authored several papers on humour in translated audiovisual texts and in a range of other contexts, including stand-up comedy.

Angelica Petrucci

Angelica Petrucci earned a Bachelor’s degree in Linguistic Mediation and Intercultural Communication summa cum laude at SSML Gregorio VII of Rome in 2014. Her academic career concentrates on translation and interpreting to and from English, Spanish, French and Chinese. In 2018 she completed a Master’s degree in Linguistics and Translation Studies at the Univerity of Rome ‘La Sapienza’, focusing in particular on Audiovisual Translation. She has worked as a freelance translator and language teacher. She moved to Warsaw in 2020, where she currently works as a procurement assistant and legal translator and proofreader at the European Border and Coast Guard Agency.