Translating cultural references in the Italian dubbing and re-dubbing of E.T. The Extra-Terrestrial

By adopting a comparative perspective, the present paper aims to investigate how and why differences are found in the dubbing and redubbing of the major motion picture E.T. The Extraterrestrial by Steven Spielberg. In particular, the analysis focuses on the translation and retranslation of culture-specific references (CSRs). The study is based on three different versions of the movie script: the original version in English (1982), the dubbed version in Italian (1982) and the redubbed version, still in Italian (2002). After an initial quantitative analysis of the three different scripts, a qualitative analysis was carried out adopting Vinay – Darbelnet’s (2000) taxonomy to categorize the translations of CSRs, as cases of Direct Translations or Oblique Translations. The study confirms Berman’s (1990) Retranslation Hypothesis on literary retransmissions and indicates that the two decades that divide the first and second dubbing of the movie have been culturally and linguistically crucial, widening the cultural and linguistic horizons of contemporary Italian viewers.