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Ebook in formato Pdf leggibile su questi device: Computer. Con Software: Adobe PDF Reader. Con App: Adobe PDF Reader. In April 2008 we were invited to speak at the Triennale di Milano, as part of a two-day. Moderated by Italian TV critic and media scholar Aldo Grasso. This time, Italian cultural life witnessed a shift in reading tastes and the emergence. Enciclopedia Garzanti della Televisione, Garzanti, 2006; Aldo Grasso, Storia della.
Invisible Mediations: The Role of Adaptation and Dubbing Professionals in Shaping US TV for Italian Audiences
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0 The important role of selecting programs and inserting them in a specific timeslot is highlighted by John Ellis, 'Scheduling. The Last Creative Act in Television?' , Media , Culture & Society , 22(1), 25-38, 20001 Denise D. Bielby, Christina L. Harrington, Global TV. Exporting Television and Culture in the World Market, New York University Press , 20082 Networks can add value to their programming adopting strategies of program and network branding. See Catherine Johnson , Branding Television, Routledge, 2012With the increasing global circulation of media products, professionals devoted to the process of audiovisual translation and 'national mediation' for foreign ready-made programmes have gained a central role in contemporary TV. Presenting the results of an ethnographical study, this essay explores the 'invisible art' of TV adaptation and dubbing, explaining its procedures, traditions and challenges. Adaptation has to consider both the technical necessities of the audio-visual and cross-cultural aspects of translation, while dubbing involves extremely intricate production routines, professionals with different skills, written and unwritten rules, a range of different workplaces, economic investments and traditions. The result is a new text, modified following contrasting linguistic, cultural and professional goals.Adaptation; Dubbing; Global Circulation; National Mediation; Media Industries; Italian Television-R e a p p r o p r i a t i o nThe international distribution of TV shows has created a ‘global television marketplace,’1 where audiences of differentnations can become familiar with the same characters, narratives and formats. Meanwhile, however, these globalproducts often acquire different values, and sometimes even different forms, according to the varied contexts, culturesand nations that they are inserted into.2In fact, as the same products spread all over the world, the importance of ‘national mediation’ – the complex setof practices used by broadcasters to acquire a foreign product and then show it to the national public – grows, tobridge the gap to local cultural and media objects originally intended for other audiences with different languages andbackgrounds. The forms of this mediation play a crucial role and, often unnoticed by viewers, impact deeply on foreigntexts, creating national editions that differ in many ways from the original TV shows on which they were based.Readymade products – such as series, sitcoms and factual programming – are adapted and dubbed before being aired onpay and free channels, and this ‘invisible art,’ as it is sometimes called, profoundly re-shapes the original audio andvideo, thus affecting the value, the meaning and the success of many titles.When Italian viewers watch a US TV series or sitcom, the product is, often unbeknown to them, different from theone its original audience enjoyed. Many jokes, references and plays on words are reconstructed to better fit anotherculture, society and media system. And even the choice of single words, the structure of some phrases, or the actors’intonations may differ at least slightly from the intentions of the original authors and producers from abroad.This mediation seeks to translate and adapt the original product for a better fit to the target culture. The process isguided not only by linguistic and cultural aims but also by economic goals and professional habits. As highlightedby many recent studies on ‘production culture’ in media industries,3 the complex mixture of working practices,professionals’ established ideas and trade know-how defines a field – or, to use a loaded term, a professionalideology: a coherent group of assumptions and undisputed routines – that results in modifications and differentdevelopment trajectories. Consequently, when working on the original TV series, the adaptation and dubbingprofessionals are often looking both for a good rendering of foreign dialogues and for ways to make their job easier.How does this complex mediation process work? How many professionals are involved in the localization andadaptation of foreign TV products? What are their roles and habits? In what ways does the nature of this ‘invisiblemediation’ affect the Italianized result, and what approaches are followed?This essay seeks to answer these questions, presenting the results of an extended ethnographical study thatexamined how the Italian editions of The Simpsons (XVIII season, dubbed in 2007) and How I Met Your Mother (Vseason, dubbed in 2010) were produced, through in-depth interviews with many professionals involved, industry datagathering and participant observation during translation and adaptation processes.4 The two sitcoms, firstly aired onthe same commercial network (Italia 1) and then repeated by several digital channels (Fox Italia the former, PremiumJoi and Italia 2 the latter), were still on air with incoming new seasons, and constitute perfect examples of multilayeredtexts, with a complex batch of topics, references and puns that have to be shifted for a different national audience andthen can provide a dense battleground for contrasting ideas, labour habits and procedures.While the majority of the research on these themes is made from a mainly linguistic or cultural point of view,5 thisessay aims to detail and generalize the various steps in the process of adapting and dubbing foreign TV series forItalian audiences. Thus, it adopts a perspective focused on media industries and their production cultures – able todeepen an often oversimplified idea of dubbing and underline the important role of professionals –, and concentratesas well on the specificities in the mediation of television products. Italy is a particularly interesting case amongother European dubbing countries (like France, Germany, or Spain), not so much for the widespread and enduringperception that the ‘Italian school’ of dubbing is one of the best and most accurate in the world6 as for its long tradition,which has helped to establish fixed routines, shared best practices, and clearly defined professional roles: even if alarge part of these processes are standard international routines, it is into the Italian media landscape that they reacha full extent, and a certain level of self-reflexivity. The ‘complex machine’ that translates, adapts and prepares thedubbing of every imported TV show can be best analyzed in this context.2 T r a n s l a t i n g , A d a p t i n g , M e d i a t i n gThe task of preparing the Italian edition of a foreign TV series is coordinated by the broadcaster that will air theproduct. It exercises ever-present editorial and technical control, which is achieved in practice through severalspecialist professional mediators working across the film and media industry.The international distributor usually provides the networks with important starting materials: the videos of everyepisode, the original scripts with the English dialogue, and the international soundtrack containing music, noisesand other sounds that are not to be changed. All this forms the basis for the first step towards the national edition:translation. During this phase, one or more specialist translators produce a first version of the Italian dialogue for eachepisode: sometimes, to speed up the process, each professional works on a single episode, or some parts of it, whileothers translate other episodes or parts of the same series.Fig. 1. The first page of the original script of How I Met Your Mother, ‘Duel Citizenship’, 5: 5Unlike in literary translation, this version of the dialogue is far from definitive, and (at least in some parts) is constantlynegotiated and refined to facilitate the subsequent steps. After an initial viewing and a briefing about the series(frequently skipped for lack of time), the translators follow the original audio and video, read the English script anddevise an Italian version that takes into account, at least partially, the timing of the dialogues. On one hand, the maingoals at this stage are fidelity to the original script and accuracy in tone and meaning; on the other, the translationmust always be a useful tool for the whole Italianization process – the linguistic and cultural mediation according tothe Italian audiences’ implied needs and habits. Therefore, through trial and error, the translation is shaped to be‘bold’ and full of information: the document is marked with guidance on intonation, voices and emotions, e.g. ‘(vo)’ forvoice-over, ‘(ft)’ for a short breath (fiato), ‘...’ for a short pause, and ‘/’ for a longer one; 7 every cultural, social or mediareference is explained in detail, with clarifications and various translation proposals via dedicated notes (ndt); andjokes and slang are Italianized in several ways, thus offering the adaptor more than one acceptable solution.I usually try to stay as close as possible to the original version, to provide the adaptors the fullest scope so that theycan decide later. That’s why the translations are full of notes and explanations, to give them all the information theyneed.8Hence, the translation stage often becomes a standard, routine procedure, with fixed equivalences, the same pointsrequiring attention, and limited ‘creative’ solutions. This first Italian version is a draft, a canovaccio, a work in progresson which the subsequent adaptation will be based.Fig. 2. The first page of the Italian translated version of How I Met Your Mother, 5: 57 Data collected in the participant observation during the translation of How I Met Your Mother, 2010.8 Antonella Radice, one of the translators for the Italian edition of How I Met Your Mother, interview, 2010.After a quick proofread, the translation is handed on to another professional, often a non-translator, who will carry outthe adaptation and complete the Italian dialogues: the adaptor. At this stage, the translated script is revisited, and oftencompletely rewritten, in order to address – as a much higher priority than fidelity to the original version – the technicalnecessities arising from the audiovisual and cultural aspects of its reception by an audience linguistically and sociallydifferent from its intended original one.The adaptor/dialogist carefully watches every episode, tries out the translated text to see how it fits when read out withthe video, and recreates the lines to suit the movements and timings on screen. With a well-trained eye and ear, theyrepeat and finely adjust each line until it is perfectly synchronized with the screen and ‘naturally’ meaningful for theviewer. As a result, the original foreign text becomes increasingly distant, as progressive adjustments, additions anddeletions are made to its Italian counterpart.Fig. 3. The first page of the Italian adapted version of How I Met Your Mother, ‘La doppia cittadinanza’, 5: 5In more detail, the adaptation takes place on three different levels. The first is to round off the translator’s work, as allthe pauses and intonations are inserted into the draft to guide the recording of the lines during the dubbing, and thescript is polished.On a second level, adaptation transforms the dialogue to meet the different, and often contrasting, goals ofsynchronism and simplicity. The words in each phrase have to reflect the movements of the actors’ mouths on screenand, more generally, the pauses and rhythms in their acting - although a lip sync,9 with a perfect match between(foreign) lips and (Italian) sounds, is difficult to obtain and is commonly sought only for the more prominent vowels, anexpressive synchronism is always needed:You have to pay attention to the rhythms; it is very important they are close to the original. If the actor’s mouthmoves at a certain speed, you have to follow that as much as possible, modifying the number of syllables andthe words you have decided to use. The Italian rhythm must follow the internal rhythm of the video, with itschanges and cuts, and of the pauses that must be maintained.10Meanwhile, this work on the length and construction of the dialogues must not interfere with the meaning of thescenes and phrases: another target in the adaptation process is to keep the characters and their way of speakingrealistic and natural in the target language.This leads to the third level of adaptation: the modification of content, wordplay and cultural references, and othersemantic choices. Here, the adaptor polishes the dialogue, finds different synonyms, changes tone and register,fixes the jokes and the intertextual elements to make them better understood by the (implied) audience, according tohis/her established ideas and usual adaptation practice. The main choice is between the two different strategies offoreignization, a source-oriented attempt to remain loyal to the original and bring the viewer partially into the foreignenvironment, and domestication, a target-oriented way to simplify the text and mould it to the target national culture.11The dialogist uses an array of tools and strategies – e.g. reduction, generalization, equivalence and substitution– to refine the various elements: e.g. figures of speech, accents and other characteristic linguistic details; aspectsof everyday life from local foods to institutions; and film, song and media references that may be unknown to anaudience living in a different media arena.12 Especially with comedies and sitcoms, every joke must be adapted to thetastes and humour of the national public: the frequent use of a laugh track adds another layer of constraint, imposingnot only that the jokes be translated but also that the same rhythms and timings be used as in the original. A flat puncould be seen by the audience as a sign of weakness in the comedy, thus affecting the perception of the whole series.The adaptor works at the same time on these three often contrasting levels, trying to produce a version of the originalthat is accurate – if not in its individual words then at least in its meaning and tone – and to simplify the dubbing step.For instance, it is a complex combination of simplification, synchronism issues and semantic choices that forces thedialogist to change the adaptation of fake-Canadian word ‘hydro-bill’ from ‘elettro-bolletta’ (‘electro-bill’), chosen by thetranslator, to ‘elettro-prelievo’ (‘electro-withdrawal’), in order to make the compound word used in the first scene of aHow I Met Your Mother episode (Fig. 1, 2 and 3) more funny and ridiculous for a non-English-speaking viewer.Moreover, sometimes the changes to the original text can be considered as a form of censorship: using the Italianaudience’s needs as an excuse, the adaptation can weaken some aspect of the series, especially regardingsexuality, strong language, politics or religion. While it is true that these areas are crucial in the editing process,this phenomenon is more properly a form of self-censorship: without any pressure from the network, according toa sensibility developed over time, adaptors often choose to eliminate problematic elements to avoid subsequentrework. Time and budget constraints and professional habits are more powerful than any intent to erase controversial9 Thomas Herbst, ‘Why Dubbing is Impossible’ and Gianni G. Galassi, ‘Torna a casa lessico’ [Vocabulary comes home], in Christine Heiss, RosaMaria Bollettieri Bosinelli, eds., Traduzione multimediale per il cinema, la televisione e la scena [Multimedia translation for film, television and thestage], Clueb, 1996.10 Luca Sandri, adaptor and dubbing director for the Italian edition of How I Met Your Mother, interview, 2010.11 Lawrence Venuti, The Translator’s Invisibility, Routledge, 1995.12 Luca Barra, Risate in scatola, 129–183. See also Elisa Perego, Christopher Taylor, Tradurre l’audiovisivo [Audiovisual translation], Carocci, 2012.It must be noted, in addition, that the extent of these modifications has changed in recent decades.13 In the nineties,the push towards domestication often changed entire storylines, with Fran Drescher becoming an Italian Americanfrom the Ciociaria region in The Nanny14, or The Simpsons’ characters speaking in southern regional dialects, likeNeapolitan and Sardinian.15 Several years on, however, the appreciation of the cultural value of the TV series andthe general Italian audience’s greater comprehension of the English-speaking world has helped the adaptors inforeignizing and in maintaining the original references.The adaptor’s final task is to split the Italian script of every episode into single pages and smaller segments, called‘rings’ (anelli), because the celluloid was originally cut and tied in a circular form: this mark (segnatura) will be usefulduring the dubbing.At this point, the translated draft has been rewritten several times, becoming something quite different: a dialoguearranged to video for synchrony, modified in problematic passages and meanings, and divided into smaller modules.Every stage loosens the link with the original text while facilitating the most ‘mechanical’ and structured part of thewhole mediation process: dubbing.3 D u b b i n g : A n I n v i s i b l e A r t ( a n d P r a c t i c e )The next stage in the making of the Italian edition of a TV series – dubbing – entails a series of well-defined steps,where various professionals with different skills follow an intricate set of written and unwritten rules, to record theItalian voice soundtrack of every episode. Time and budget are fundamental factors, often affecting productionroutines and creative needs.16First, the dubbing phase must be carefully prepared, to facilitate and accelerate the subsequent activity. On one hand,the different characters’ Italian voices have to be chosen: main actors are selected through a casting process involvingbroadcasting executives, while minor roles are allocated more freely, taking into account similarity to the originalvoice, age and physical type or just the person’s availability on the right days or their ability to reach the studio at shortnotice. On the other hand, the management prepares the working plans, carefully indicating to the professionals which‘rings’ need to be dubbed, and scheduling their work into shifts. The overall job demands precise planning. The basiclabour unit is the ‘dubbing shift’ (turno di doppiaggio), lasting three hours. Every day comprises three shifts. During ashift, the Italian dialogue lines of various episodes and episode parts are recorded, often in a non-chronological order,according to the production need to compress the number of shifts for each TV series. In most cases, the dubbersrecord their lines alone, in the so-called ‘single column’ (colonna singola) or ‘separate column’ (colonna separata),interacting with the other characters’ original English voices: the dialogues can be less realistic, but this systemguarantees more precise control over the individual recordings and helps save time and money.Given how the work is organized, therefore, the dubbing phase has a strongly modular character. Every episodeand season of a TV series is split into dialogue segments (the ‘rings’), mixed and recomposed according to therequirements of every shift. The Italian version of the episode is assembled shift by shift, with the voices of eachdubbing actor put together in the correct order:13 Aldo Grasso, Storia della televisione italiana [History of Italian television], Garzanti, 2005.14 Chiara F. Ferrari, Since When is Fran Drescher Jewish? Dubbing Stereotypes in The Nanny, The Simpsons, and The Sopranos, University ofTexas Press, 2011.15 Luca Barra, ‘Springfield, Italia. Slittamenti e conversioni di senso nell’adattamento italiano di una serie televisiva statunitense’ [Springfield, Italy.Shifts and changes of meaning in the Italian adaptation of an American television series], Studi culturali, 4(2), 2007, 207–231.16 George M. Luyken, Thomas Herbst, Jo Langham-Brown, Helen Reid, Herman Spinhof, Overcoming Language Barriers in Television. Dubbingand Subtitling for the European Audience, European Institute for the Media, 1991.The voice of the individual dubber is denuded of all its supporting elements. As the other voices are graduallyadded into the scene, everything falls into place. At first, you can only imagine what the result will be like.17Dubbing facilities are usually composed of two spaces with different functions. In a soundproofed ‘dubbing room’ (saladi doppiaggio), the dubbers record their lines under the dubbing assistant’s watchful eye. In the ‘control room’ (sala diregia), the dubbing director supervises operations, and a sound technician operates the recording machines. Betweenthe two spaces, a glass panel reveals what is happening on screen, and microphones make communication possiblewhen needed.Fig. 4. The dubbing room during work on an episode of The SimpsonsThe dubbers, or – as they like to call themselves – the ‘halved actors’ (attori dimezzati),18 act the Italian lines of acharacter to be recorded and combined with the video. In the dubbing room, they watch the episode video and listenthrough their headphones to the original voice of the foreign actors or to the Italian tracks already recorded by otherdubbers. In front of them, together with the Italian adapted script with the lines that have to be acted, a red lightindicates when recording is under way. Usually, dubbing actors do a first rehearsal and then record a part of a ring, ora full ring. These professionals have to re-evoke and reproduce every part of the original acting, not just the dialogue;pauses, laughs, sighs and mumbles need to be fully remade by the Italian voices, following the rhythm of what canbe seen on screen. After the first recording, if deemed necessary, partial or total retakes may be made, following thedubbing director’s instructions, in order to obtain the best possible outcome.Together with the dubbing actors, a dubbing assistant is often present in the dubbing room. He/she performs a coupleof technical tasks: checking the synchrony in the lines recorded by the dubbers, focusing on the length and theendpoints of every phrase; and documenting and counting the episode lines that have been recorded in every shift.Fig. 5. The control room during work on an episode of How I Met Your MotherInside the control room, the dubbing director coordinates all the dubbers’ work, deciding which dialogue segment mustbe recorded each time, establishing its beginning and end, and informing the others of the ring number and the videotime code. He/she helps the voice actors, telling them the context of the lines in the episode plot, explaining the jokesincluded in the dialogues, and giving useful guidance on the main difficulties in the dialogue. Instructions are impartedon the times, rhythms and lengths of the phrases – ‘don’t run’, ‘make it shorter’, ‘let’s start a second earlier’ – on voiceintonation and pronunciation – ‘you’re falling’, ‘it’s too nasal’, ‘a little less messy, please’ – and on more editorial andartistic aspects – ‘put some irony into the line’, ‘you have to be cold at the beginning and sadistic at the end’, ‘do it likea commercial.’19 In general, the dubbing director assures the quality of the Italian edition: while the dubbers work onseveral projects at the same time, the director has the full picture of the title as a whole, checking the work of variousprofessionals and ensuring that it is all up to standard. On occasion, if necessary to make the Italian dialogues soundbetter or to correct some recurring problem, the dubbing director may modify the script, changing some words in thedialogues. These corrections – minor modifications to synonyms, verb tenses, adjectives and other details, or moresignificant alterations to references, jokes and wordplay – are made on the fly, in real time, and solving one problemcan lead to others.The last professional to be involved in the dubbing phase is a specialized sound technician, who records multipleversions of all the dubbed voices, selects the best tracks, anticipates the natural delays between spoken phrasesand the video, and keeps a record of the different starting points. The professional practices involved in dubbingare well defined and firmly rooted, with precise roles established over several decades and a terminology that oftenhas its roots in the early days of film. Within the strict timescales and budgets imposed by the broadcasters – whichoften send a representative to the dubbing studio to make random checks on the Italian edition – the standardizedprocess ensures that the various professional activities involved are all performed to best overall effect. There aresome exceptions to this routine. For instance, when songs or musical passages have to be translated into the nationallanguage, special dubbing shifts (turni cantati) offer dubber-singers more time to work closely with the director torehearse and record every section of the song. Other examples are the ‘buzz shifts’ (turni di brusio), where mass19 Excerpts collected during the participant observation during the dubbing of How I Met Your Mother, 2010.scenes and minor characters with just one line are dubbed all together, as various dubbing actors rapidly recordindividual and collective roles (e.g. a group of children). During other actors’ shifts, ‘remakes’ (rifacimenti) can still bemade: if the director is not satisfied with the previous recording of a piece of dialogue, he/she can recall the actor foranother take, which can be done in a few minutes when director and dubber are both available.After every single line of the season has been recorded, post-production can start. First, the audio tracks of the Italianversion are put together and synchronized with the video; then, these are mixed with the fixed parts of the internationalsoundtrack (background noises, music, canned laughter for sitcoms, etc.) to obtain the complete Italian soundtrack.Alongside this process, some changes are made on video too, in an editing process that adds subtitles, explanationsand other graphics for elements that need adapting to the Italian dialogues and the needs of the national audience.After the (dubbed) audio and the (slightly modified) video have been matched, the Italian edition of every episode isnow complete and ready to be broadcast in a carefully selected slot to reach the widest possible audience.As is now clear, during the dubbing phase, carefully adapting original texts and ensuring the artistic quality of the workare just two of the main concerns. Although essential parts of any project, these tasks are adapted to suit differentgoals and work habits. The balance between the fixed, stable presence of the dubbing director, who oversees theseries in its entirety, and the fleeting presence of the dubbing actors, who often have to switch between completelydifferent characters in the space of just a few hours, is also an important factor. So is the modularity of the process,as every scene is sliced into many pieces that will be reconstructed only at the end. The financial and time constraintsand the various alterations to the adapted text also contribute to an incremental construction of the Italian dialogueunder several professionals’ control, as it departs further and further from the plain translation of the original text.4 T o B e C o n t i n u e d . . . T h e S e r i a l i t y I s s u eAs the above reconstruction of the ‘mediation’ processes that build the Italian edition of a foreign TV series clearlyshows, besides editorial attention to the correct translation and adaptation of the original texts, several changes andmodifications are made under standard working practices and habits to simplify the work or to reduce lead times andcosts. The role of the ‘invisible mediators’ – the professionals who contribute their varied expertise, working to differentgoals, to build the incremental national dialogue piece by piece – must not be underestimated. Indeed, knowledge oftheir established ideas, professional practices and traditions helps us understand the wide range of alterations madeto every foreign TV episode, thus affecting how it may be received by Italian audiences.In addition, the serial nature of TV programmes, grouped as they often are into seasons and episodes, cuts acrossthe modularity of the work routines in other ways, adding another layer of complexity. To dub a single season takesseveral weeks; a year later, all the dubbers and other professionals usually come together again to work on thesubsequent season: in the meantime, they have contributed to several other movies and TV series. The Italianedition of a series forms part of multiple workflows, leading to possible continuity issues: since the professionalsrarely look to previous years’ translation and adaptation choices, sometimes the same joke can appear in differentways in the national version; voices and intonations may slightly change; recurrent catchphrases are not correctlyidentified, and so on. Exacerbated by the lack of reference to the previous adaptations, the Italian mediators’ job is,in some ways, ‘blind’: unlike the original authors, dubbing professionals have no idea about how the characters aregoing to develop, e.g. a minor character (whose voice may have been chosen without much thought) may acquire amajor role, thus leading to poor results or drastic changes. Moreover, the Italian edition must take into account theItalian editions of other media, too. Thus, the same voice can be used for the same actor in different contexts, andreferences incomprehensible to the audience can be avoided: in How I Met Your Mother, ‘Woooo!’, 4: 8, for example,the reference to Mad Men was replaced with No Country for Old Man, also because the Mad Men series had not beenbroadcast yet in Italy. The consequences of seriality and a complex media system thus bring other ‘distortions’ to theItalianized versions of TV shows.Lastly, it is important to underline how the creation of the Italian edition of TV series is an intermediate phase inbetween other important moments that can influence and affect how foreign texts are received domestically andcan profoundly change not only their dialogues but also their meanings and values. Before adaptation and dubbing,international markets, acquisitions and licence contracts20 set the rules for what broadcasters can do with the series,establishing a licence period and a number of runs (and reruns). After that, scheduling choices (selecting a networkand time slot, organizing blocks, strips and marathons, adopting a repetition pattern)21 and promotion, on air andacross other media (print, online, etc.),22 construct and give meaning to the relationship between the text and theviewers. Italian editions must be seen in the wider context of a large production chain.In conclusion, as this paper has shown, the work of the adaptation and dubbing professionals, which is often takenfor granted, concretely shapes the different product that Italian audiences will encounter, and their practices, workingconstraints and traditional routines are fundamental for a more developed comprehension of the real dynamicsinvolved in the global circulation of media contents and products.Luca Barra, PhD, is Research Fellow at Università Cattolica del Sacro Cuore, in Milan, where he teaches MediaEconomics and TV Scheduling. He is senior researcher at Ce.R.T.A. – Centro di Ricerca sulla Televisione e gliAudiovisivi. His research focuses on the international circulation of media products, the history of Italian TV, and theevolution of the contemporary media landscape. He has published a book – Risate in scatola (Vita e Pensiero, Milan2012) – and several essays in edited books and journals, and he contributes regularly to the Italian television studiesjournal Link. Idee per la televisione.3 John T. Caldwell , Production Culture . Industrial Reflexivity and Critical Practice in Film and Television , Duke, 2008 ; Mark Deuze, Media Work , Polity, 2007 ; Vicky Mayer, Miranda J. Banks , John T. Caldwell, eds., Production Studies. Cultural Studies of Media Industries, Routledge , 2009 ; Timothy Havens, Amanda Lotz , Understanding Media Industries, Oxford University Press, 2012 .4 Luca Barra, 'The Mediation is the Message . Italian Regionalization of US TV Series as Co-Creational Work ', International Journal of Cultural Studies , 12 ( 5 ), 2009 , 509 - 525 ; Luca Barra, Risate in scatola. Storia, mediazioni e percorsi distributivi della situation comedy americana in Italia [Canned laughter. History, mediations and distribution approaches of American situation comedy in Italy] , Vita e Pensiero , 2012 .5 See, for instance: Delia Chiaro, Christiane Heiss , Chiara Bucaria, eds., Between Text and Image . Updating Research in Screen Translation, John Benjamins, 2008 ; Jorge Diaz-Cintas , Gunilla M . Anderman, eds., Audiovisual Translation . Language Transfer on Screen, Palgrave MacMillan , 2009 ; Jan Pedersen, Subtitling Norms for Television, John Benjamins, 2011 ; Frederic Chaume Varela, Audiovisual Translation . Dubbing, St. Jerome, 2012 ; or Christina Adamou, Simone Knox , ' Transforming Television Drama through Dubbing and Subtitling. Sex and the Cities ' , Critical Studies in Television, 6 ( 1 ), 2011 , 1 - 21 .6 Mario Paolinelli , Elena Di Fortunato, Tradurre per il doppiaggio [Translating for dubbing] , Hoepli , 2005 .17 Interview recorded during the participant observation during the dubbing of How I Met Your Mother , 2010 .18 Alberto Castellano, ed., Il doppiaggio. Profilo , storia e analisi di un'arte negata [Dubbing. Profile, history and analysis of a hidden art] , Aidac , 2000 .