Dealing with multilingualism in Tv Series: a descriptive and multimodal analysis

This doctoral research falls within the sphere of Translation Studies, and in particular in the field of audiovisual translation (AVT), a variety of translation in which I specialised during university studies and I started my professional work. After the establishment of AVT as an autonomous academic discipline in the 90s and behind the more general studies on the modalities of audiovisual translation that took place in those early years, in this thesis I have chosen multilingualism in audiovisual texts as an object of study. The film The Godfather 1 (Il Padrino, Francis Ford Coppola, 1972)1 is a good example of multilingualism in audiovisual texts. In this film, Michael Corleone goes to Sicily to embrace his roots and his culture. There he meets Apollonia, and he asks her father’s permission to court her. In the following scene, Michael asks his bodyguard Fabrizio to translate what he says. In the original version, Michael speaks English and asks Fabrizio to play the role of the interpreter to translate the dialogues into Sicilian dialect, which is reasonable since the scene is set in Sicily and Apollonia’s father only speaks dialect. Inexplicably, in the Italian version, Fabrizio does not act as an interpreter, since he paraphrases what Michael says. With this memory in mind and with the desire to deepen the study of AVT, the idea arose to investigate what factors (textual and extra-textual) influence the translation of multilingualism into a coherent corpus of audiovisual texts. My path in this field of research started with the final dissertation of the Master in Screen Translation at the University of Turin. This thesis extends the corpus of my analysis to three television series and collects information about the process of translation into Italian