Carla Mereu Keating

Rome’s pioneering film production facility Cines (1905–37), the first ever to be built and the first ever to produce sound films in Italy, underwent a number of spatial, energy, and technological changes and additions. Approaching the history of this studio from a material and spatial perspective, I locate its infrastructural growth in the context of Rome’s rapid urbanization and shed light on the complex interaction among real-estate investments, political governance, and innovations in the film industry. By considering the forces behind Cines’s unsustainable expansion, I argue that we can better understand the genesis, and longevity, of its successor Cinecittà.

During the late 1920s and the 1930s, the Italian government sought various commercial and politically oriented solutions to cope with the advent of new sound technologies in cinema. The translation of foreign-language films became a recurrent topic of ongoing debates surrounding the use of the Italian language, the rebirth of the national film industry and cinema’s mass popularity.
Through the analysis of state records and the film trade press, The Politics of Dubbing explores the industrial, ideological and cultural factors that played a role in the government’s support for dubbing. The book outlines the evolution of film censorship regulation in Italy and its interplay with film translation practices, discusses the reactions of Mussolini’s administration to early Italian-language talkies produced abroad and documents the state’s role in initiating and encouraging Italians’ habit of watching dubbed films.

In the early 1930s the crime film Scarface: The Shame of a Nation (1932, USA, dir. Howard Hawks) stirred censorship controversies in the United States because of its gritty portrayal of criminality and violence.
Debates over crime, race and immigration proliferated in the North-American press and finally led to Italian-American pressure groups to call out for the film’s boycott because it ‘offended the Italian nation and people’ and vilified immigrant communities.
Archival historical research in AVT has revealed how film versions have frequently been cut and dialogues ideologically manipulated to suit political agendas, commercial interests and dominant sexual and religious moralities.
Indeed the translation of films has often served too many masters, suffering direct or indirect censorship intervention whenever a film defied existing societal taboos.
My contribution aims to offer a diachronic perspective on the reception of Scarface lo sfregiato in Italy. It will look at the film’s Italian-language translation and re-translations for cinema, television and DVD, prepared by different hands and re-voiced by different actors during a span of fifty years (1940-90s).
From the textual and contextual analysis of the film’s different Italian editions, it will be possible to trace significant ideological shifts in the reception of Italian-American crime iconography and in the language used to communicate it.

Open Access http://riviste.unimi.it/index.php/AMonline/article/view/6851
In Ideological Manipulation in Audiovisual Translation, Special Issue of Altre Modernità - Other Modernities, Rivista di studi letterari e culturali (State University of Milan, 2016)

S'inspirant du project d'Italia Taglia et de son étude de la censure visuelle et des autorisations de projection en Italie, le présent article a pour but d'explorer les interférences liées à la censure dans les versions doublées en italien de films étrangers projetés pendant la période fasciste. L'étude se concentre sur les pratiques liées à l'exclusion de texte verbal dans la langue cible, et illustre la réécriture à travers le processus de traduction des dialogues contenant des références dérangeantes à la politique, à la morale, et à la religion. Nous expliciterons l'influence des commissions de censeurs sur les studios de doblage ainsi que le rôle des censeurs dans le processus de traduction, lorsqu'ils ajustent et négocient le contenu des versions doublées en italien.

During the transition from silent to sound film, the US film majors developed new film translation practices to target their diverse non-English-speaking audiences worldwide. Foreign-language units were set up in Los Angeles (where the majors had their larger production studios) and New York (where they had their European offices) with the aim of making English-language films accessible to other communities of speakers. My research into archives and libraries in the US aims to trace the origins and developments of this film translation industry and to document and contextualise historically the changes that occurred between the late 1920s and the mid-1940s. Through the analysis of archival records, trade press, film prints and scripts, my study ultimately aims to provide the first detailed account of the work of translators, adapters, actors and directors who were employed by the US film producers and distributors precisely for their foreign-language skills and to demonstrate how crucial their activities were for guaranteeing Hollywood dominance of international markets.

https://migratingtexts.wordpress.com/
Migrating Texts is a popular series of seminars, masterclasses and workshops on translation for publishing, stage and screen. These events, organised in collaboration with colleagues from King’s College (now Exeter) and Birkbeck, involved students, academics and members of the creative industries. They were hosted annually (2019 was its fifth year) by the Institute of Modern Languages Research (IMLR), School of Advanced Studies (SAS), University of London.
These events attracted external funding from the London Arts & Humanities Partnerships (Cohort Development and Training Fund) and the European Commission in London. Topics covered: “Accessibility”, “Multilingualism”, “Innovation and Technology”, “Immaterial Labour”, “Audience Research”.

This study examines how film translation practices in Italy have been subject to state-run film censorship between the years 1923 and 1963. It also investigates the role that the Italian governments held between the mid-1930s and the early 1960s in initiating and reinforcing the Italians’ habit of dubbing foreign cinema. 
Research on the Italia Taglia database and at the archives of the Direzione Generale per il Cinema in Rome shows the extent to which national film censorship has influenced the practice of both silent and sound film translation (i.e. inter-titling and dubbing). Archival and historical research also uncovers the economic interests, political pressures and cultural concerns that have privileged the use of dubbing over other types of film translation (e.g. subtitling).
The investigation ultimately suggests that the penetration of foreign cinema in Italy was domesticated through the dubbing operation. Dubbing neutralises the audible linguistic otherness of foreign films by re-placing foreign actors’ voices with Italian actors’ voices. It also favours censorship and target-oriented strategies of translation, privileging domestic standards and values over those conveyed by foreign films. In so doing, dubbing creates a complex cultural impact upon the way Italian audiences are exposed to, and receive, the foreignness of films.