Contrastive and diachronic analysis of discrimination, stereotypes and ideological manipulation in the television series Shameless and its dubbing into Italian and Spanish

Abstract

The general aim of this thesis is to present the results of a descriptive study of the Italian and Spanish dubbing of the American television series Shameless. Shameless is set in the South Side of Chicago, a difficult neighborhood, in which we find a poor and dysfunctional family of Irish origin, the Gallaghers, made up of an alcoholic father, Frank, and his six children. The series features dialogues containing many instances of discriminatory and stereotypical expressions, as well as clearly evident ideological orientations. The thesis is meant to demonstrate the extent to which ideology has an impact on the target versions, and which of the two is closest to the original, after being shaped by dubbing professionals (mainly translators). Research in the field of Audiovisual Translation should go above and beyond the traditional linguistic domain. One would have to dig deeper to find out what is behind many ideologically motivated changes and what role the socio-cultural environment plays in their existence. In this new and necessary type of ideological research, CDA plays an important role. Of fundamental importance is also the development of a new typology of translation strategies, intended specifically for the analysis of occurrences of ideological positions. The methodological foundations of this research rest on Romero and De Laurentiis's (2016) typology of translation strategies, which was applied by the two scholars to the analysis of ideological marks such as religion, sex, drugs, social groups and obscene language. Differently, this study focuses on the existence of very specific occurrences of discrimination, ideological manipulation and stereotypes, transforming and adapting their translation strategies to a purely ideological and non-linguistic perspective. In order to address the corpus analysis, we focused on what has been named linguistic unit, i.e. an element or an entire expression related to the ideological categories taken into consideration. The translation is observed at a pragmatic level, that is, looking at discourse in context, as a real and concrete action, in which the meaning is the most relevant part. Some ideological categories are short linguistic units, while others have a wider extension because they represent ways of behaving or thinking that are ideologically connoted and require the observation of a larger portion of text to be understood. The ethical violations under examination are stereotypes, discrimination and ideological manipulation. A taxonomy consisting of twenty-one ideological marks was obtained multiplying the three types of ethical violation, by the seven main ideological categories observed, namely gender, race (with nationality and ethnicity as two subcategories), religion, sexual orientation and social class. The selection of the macro categories is anything but random. When it comes to gender, one is most likely led to speak of sexual orientation as well, and normally the social class to which an individual belongs is mentioned, and most probably it will lead to talking about race, which is, in turn, almost always related to religion, thus depicting the essence of our society. The main hypotheses presented is that the Italian version is more discriminatory, manipulative and stereotypical than the Spanish one. In order to draw substantial conclusions, the study is conducted on a corpus of over 220 hours of television, that is to say, 96 episodes which correspond to the first eight seasons of the series. All the occurrences of discrimination, ideological manipulation and stereotypes about gender, sexual orientation, race, religion and social class are highlighted in the corpus and analyzed from a quantitative and qualitative perspective. The research shall also establish considerations on the veracity of the dialogues and themes dealt with in the series with respect to the historical and socio-political period it purports to describe.