Translating Woody Allen into Italian: creativity in dubbing

Abstract

The aim of this article is to highlight the peculiar status of the adapter and dubbing director in the Italian film industry. For reasons partly to do with the historical development of the dubbing film industry in Italy, adapters—who may or may not also be the actual translators of the films, but who are here considered as distinct professional figures—have always enjoyed a great deal of freedom and have been able to express their creative skills. This paper focuses on the translation process of Woody Allen's films into Italian, taken here as an extreme example of both manipulative and effectively creative practices in film translation.1