Functional equivalence and domestication strategies in film translation

One of the charges made against Nida's theory of dynamic equivalence is that “if we follow his injunction to preserve the genius of the target language, it will mean suppressing the Otherness of the source language” (Fawcett 1997). As a matter of fact, achieving functional equivalence in a translated text quite often implies strategies of domestication (Venuti, 1995). Countless examples of domestication strategies aiming to achieve functional equivalence can be found in Italian dubbing. Italian dubbing professionals have often claimed that the ultimate aim of their profession is to make the translation invisible, in order to create an effect of suspension of disbelief in the spectators (Galassi, 1994). In other words, their purpose is to make the dialogues sound as natural as possible, so that the audience are not disturbed in their vision by destabilizing unfamiliar linguistic and cultural elements. Such a target oriented approach very often leads to justify extreme examples of adaptation of the source text, and sometimes one might even wonder whether we can still speak about a search for functional equivalence, rather than simply of manipulation. A clear example can be found in the various strategies adopted in the Italian versions of Questin Tarantino's films. For the purposes of this paper, the particular case of the references to film titles has been taken into consideration. Being Tarantino an expert cinephile, such references are definitely recurrent in the dialogues of his films. However, the Italian translators quite often appear to have adopted a functional approach limited to the level of the single line to be dubbed, and not to the level of the macrocontext made up of the whole filmography of the author. Sometimes they have adopted strategies of substitution, others of generalization, others of omission, and even in the cases where the translation turns out to be functional at the level of the microcontext of the lines, most of the time such equivalence is achieved at the expense of a more comprehensive macrocontext.