Partendo da una prospettiva culturale, tale contributo intende riflettere su quanto l’identità stessa del traduttore possa influire, in modo più o meno conscio, sulla maniera in cui vengono rappresentati i ruoli e gli equilibri di gender nel passaggio interlinguistico di un testo profondamente intriso di cultura anglo-caraibica quale Miguel Street (1959), romanzo giovanile dello scrittore Vidiadhar Surajprasad Naipaul, futuro premio Nobel nel 2001. Poiché gli stereotipi di gender rivestono un ruolo fondamentale nel romanzo, è oltremodo significativo osservare le scelte traduttive attraverso cui Marcella Dallatorre ha tentato di restituire al lettore italiano l’intrinseca complessità del patriarcale contesto socio-culturale dell’isola di Trinidad, del quale è parte integrante una vera e propria «ethic of violent masculine performance» (Rohlehr 2004: 336). L’analisi contrastiva tra source e target text evidenzia come la traduzione italiana oscilli tra differenti strategie linguistiche, ciascuna delle quali lascia intravedere in filigrana il punto di vista femminile della traduttrice nel confrontarsi con la rappresentazione della tronfia mascolinità caraibica e dei traumatici rapporti uomo-donna, spesso culminanti nell’atto di picchiare la propria compagna per un nonnulla, nella popolare convinzione che «woman and them like a good dose of blows, you know. […]. Is gospel truth about woman» (Naipaul 2002: 87).

Assuming that films are a powerful new medium through which Australian directors can establish and export their country’s national identity around the world, the aim of this paper is to explore the construction and representation of Australian identity in Italy, through the analysis of dubbing and subtitling choices in the Italian version of Picnic at Hanging Rock (1975) and Ned Kelly (2003). Even though the two films belong to two distinct stages in the Australian film industry, they still represent a pivotal moment in Australian cinema and are worth being analysed in terms of cross-cultural differences emerging between the Australian source text and the Italian version. Due to their themes – the collision between English and Australian culture and the conflict between nature and culture in Picnic at Hanging Rock, the history of the Australian hero par excellence in Ned Kelly – the two works show some linguistic and cultural elements which are worth investigating in detail. More specifically, the paper will illustrate how some geographical and cultural data strongly embedded in the Australian identity are more or less distorted or simply omitted on the basis of the “domesticating” or “foreignizing” strategies used by Italian film translators. Ultimately, a particular emphasis will be placed upon the translation of “the great Australian adjective” and other expletives mainly used by those characters belonging to Australian lower classes, whose linguistic register is often misrepresented in the Italian versions of the two films.

This volume intends to reflect on the new trends, perspectives and interdisciplinary connections of Audiovisual Translation Studies in the third millennium, trying to offer a variety of approaches and to find answers to the many questions still to be further explored in the future. Both traditional and more recent forms of AVT have been explored from a linguistic and socio-cultural point of view, in order to illustrate the complexity of the field and the multi-faceted nature of these studies today. As highlighted by many of the contributors, the long-debated question of whether audiovisual translation could indeed be included in the field of Translation Studies is now overcome. Although it still remains a form of 'constrained' translation by its own nature, the translators' linguistic contribution is not over-determined by all the other semiotic codes which are simultaneously producing sense in audiovisual products, but is one of the communicative systems in a multimodal environment. All things considered, the third millennium may well see the advent of an 'audiovisual turn' in Translation Studies, as a result of the budding expansion of the discipline and of its importance both at an academic and professional level. In this mood of renewed confidence, it comes as no surprise that an interdisciplinary perspective - as the one adopted here - seems to be all the more imperative, together with new challenges still waiting to be fully realized.