The Italian Dubbing of Dialects, Accents and Slang in the British Dark Comedy Drama Misfits

Although they are far from reflecting real interaction stricto sensu, TV series try to recreate a sort of idealised community. In order to do this, the language they use is based on those communicative patterns that are deemed prototypical for a given social group. It is therefore not surprising to find that stereotyped language variations are exploited in audiovisual texts to mark differences in social status. In particular, British TV dramas and films have often relied on such strategies to enhance dramatic characterisation. The British dark comedy drama Misfits proves to be an interesting example of the way British dialects, accents and slang are used to characterise its five young main characters. Each of them displays a peculiar accent, which reflects their social and personal background, yet they all also use contemporary slang that shows their willingness to be part of the same social group representing young people of all backgrounds. When dealing with such linguistic peculiarities, translators may resort to global strategies such as standardization to ensure the smooth processing of the target text, or opt for more creative solutions instead. Hence, this study investigates the strategies and procedures used to transfer Misfits into Italian. The comparative analysis of the English source text and its dubbed Italian counterpart shows that the characters’ dialectal inflections have been replaced by standardised pronunciation. It goes without saying that this has led to significant losses in terms of connotation. However, the translator has attempted to compensate by means of a consistent use of Italian slang and swear words to convey the in-group bonding that such linguistic elements can create

Into the Looking Glass

The article reviews the exhibition Yes Yoko Ono at the San Francisco Museum of Modern Art

This Bridge Called Imagination: On Reading the Arab Image Foundation and Its Collection

This essay examines the benefits and disadvantages of using imagination as a method of historical research in the archive. Employing Jean-Paul Sartre\u27s notion of “image-consciousness” in The Psychology of Imagination, imagination is defined and explored as a form of perception based upon temporal absence or suspension. This method is then discussed in relation to the exhibition “Not Given: Talking of and Around Photographs of Arab Women” (2006), curated by the author with artist Isabelle Massu. The installation was assembled with the cooperation of the Arab Image Foundation in Beirut and traveled from Marseille (2005-06) to San Francisco (2007). The author explores a central element in the exhibition—the mélange of terms and cultural forces operating within the Arab Image Foundation\u27s keyword system—in order to posit the presence of an archival imagination that carries the method of imaginative research into the construction of the archive itself. The Arab Image Foundation—an archive with its own peculiar cross-cultural history and digital future— is found to encourage its own particular form of engagement

The end of jobs for life?: corporate employment systems: Japan and elsewhere

"It is not only in Japan that traditional employment systems are being called into question. It has become conventional wisdom on the OECD conference circuit that we are entering a new era of intensified global competition in which only the most and quot;flexible" firms can survive. ''Flexibility'' and the elimination of rigidities, particularly labour market rigidities, became, in the mid-1980s, the keynote of prescriptions both for lack of competitiveness and for rising unemployment. Even earlier reservations about the desirability of preserving a "core" of stable, long-serving, committed workers, differentiated from a flexible "periphery" have given way to prescriptions for wholesale ''down-sizing.'' There is a flexibility trade off. Concern with labour market flexibility -- especially managers'' ability to hire and fire at will -- is strengthened in the Anglo-Saxon economies by the inflexibility of the financial markets they face. Japanese firms, being more insulated from the short-term demands of shareholders, have hitherto been able to afford more ''rigid'' employment systems from which they gain the advantage of employee commitment and cooperative and flexible attitudes to work. But today the competitiveness/flexibility concern grows in Japan too. The lifetime employment/seniority-constrained pay and promotion system is under attack. Advocacy of change is common; assertions that wholesale change has already taken place almost equally common. The reasons are to be found partly in the objective situations of many firms after four years of recession, partly in a loss of self-confidence and a ''resurgence of the American model.'' Actual change seems in fact to be marginal, but there are a number of grounds for expecting change in the future: value change -- greater affluence, diminished work ethic, and diminished egalitarianism; the possible resurgence of shareholder power; the declining influence of unions; the declining ''intellectual quality'' of blue-collar and routine white-collar workers; increased inter-firm competition and the reduction of industry cartel understandings; slower growth; low wage competition, particularly in future from China, and the "hollowing-out" response thereto. Those who have a stake in Japan''s "employee sovereignty" jimponshugi, and would be reluctant to see it slide into just another version of "shareholder sovereignty" Anglo-Saxon capitalism, might be expected to be proposing legislation to bring company law in line with current Japanese reality. No one seems to be doing so.

Photography in the Mix: Flora-Fauna-Photo

The article examines the SF Camerawork exhibition Agitate: Negotiating the Photographic Process, which was co-curated by the author

Introduction: Exploring the Many Ways of Audiovisual Translation. Retranslated, Simultaneous, Indirect, Mediated or What?

Over the last decade, a growing number of Translation Studies scholars has focused on the many aspects of AVT, as demonstrated by the proliferation of research papers in journals, essay collections and monographs devoted to this topic (e.g. Chiaro 2007; Díaz Cintas 2012; Chaume, 2012; Pérez González 2014, 2018; Maszerowska, Matamala and Orero 2014; Di Giovanni and Gambier 2018; Baños 2018 just to name a few). This has certainly enabled AVT to develop “its very own theoretical and methodological approaches, allowing it to claim the status of a scholarly area of research in its own right” (Díaz-Cintas 2009: 7). One of the interesting consequences of the rapid advances in the production of audiovisual content and the availability of its many translated versions (e.g. dubbed, (fan)subtitled, in respeaking or audio-described) is that the traditional separation between ‘dubbing’ and ‘subtitling’ countries by now appears obsolete (Gambier 2003; Chaume 2013; Sandrelli, this volume). It is probably time we overcame “the frequently futile debate over the pros and cons of dubbing and subtitling, generally simplified to subjective and pseudo-intellectual arguments” (Chaume 2012: 13). Scholarly research on AVT may fare better at exploring the intricacies and resulting phenomena that the current mediascape brings about so as to continue to contribute fruitfully to the advances in theory and practice