Dubbing multilingual films between neutralisation and preservation of lingua-cultural identities: A critical review of the current strategies in Italian dubbing

The chapter explores the role that multilingualism plays in film by focussing on three different strategies followed by Italian dubbing professionals to deal with multilingualism on screen: the preservation, the neutralisation and the quantitative reduction of the multilingual situations represented in a film. The preservation and the neutralisation of the multilingual situations present in a film turn out to belong to two opposite poles. On the one hand, preserving the different lingua-cultural identities is a clear attempt made by dubbing professionals to mirror the original version of a multilingual film, by faithfully reconstructing the same level of conflict and/or confusion present in the source product. On the other hand, entirely – or almost entirely – dubbing a multilingual film inevitably leads to linguistic flattening and homogenisation, in the sense that the different cultural identities represented on screen are deprived of their linguistic component. In between these two poles is the quantitative reduction of the multilingual situations, when dubbing professionals deem it appropriate. In this way, both primary and secondary languages tend to be adapted into Italian in the majority of cases. As a result, in the Italian version the presence of secondary languages is quantitatively reduced and qualitatively altered with respect to the original version.