Lost in Translation: Technical Aspects and Challenges in the Italian Dubbing of Miracle at St. Anna and Fargo

This thesis aims to investigate the implications of the Italian dubbing of the films Miracle at St. Anna (2008) by Spike Lee and Fargo (1996) by the Coen Brothers. Both films present themselves as two useful case studies to understand what happens in the language transfer of a product that, in its original version, is very structured from a linguistic point of view. In the field of audiovisual translation, doubts and questions about the reliability of dubbing as a means of language transfer have increased, resulting in a split in public opinion between those who still appreciate dubbed film products and those who claim that this type of translation intervention inevitably changes the original product with often negative results. My thesis poses and responds to a question that normative accounts do not contemplate; that is, whether dubbing is capable of delivering the same cultural, social and linguistic product that a film constitutes in its original language to a targeted foreign-language audience. The analysis investigates the impact of the translation choices of dialogists and translators and their effects on the rendering of the final product in Italian. The first part of this thesis aims to provide a detailed overview of the technical aspects of dubbing. In the next part, through the analysis of selected scenes from both films, I show how in a multilingual film such as Miracle at St. Anna the dubbing did not consider this a fundamental aspect of the film and did not limit itself to language transfer but rewrote entire scenes depriving the target audience of the essence of the film product. Fargo, on the other hand, with its pronounced use of the Minnesota accent, loses its linguistic distinctiveness in the transition to Italian while still managing to maintain the characterization of the characters through the acting skills of the Italian voice actors. Therefore, the analysis shows how the stronger a film is characterized linguistically and culturally, the more dubbing practices struggle to deliver the same product to the target audience, ending up distributing a film that substantially and irretrievably departs from the original product.