Shifts in audiovisual translation for children: reviving linguistic-driven analyses.

The idea for the research presented in this paper came to me while experiencing the translation of cartoons with two respected representatives of the target audience, i.e. two children. It was during this illuminating viewing and listening experience, watching American cartoons on TV in their Italian translation with two four and a half-year-old boys, that I grew aware of some dissonant notes, of incoherent solutions which made me suspicious of the translation and left me with the wish to take a look at the original. This was made possible by the ‘+ 1’ version of the channel we were watching, which broadcast the same programme one hour later and allowed me to record both the original and the translated version of the same cartoon episodes. Since then, I have repeated the experiment a few times, across the span of more than a year and at different broadcasting times. On the whole, my suspicions were confirmed and led me to think that TV cartoons in their Italian translation very frequently reveal shifts in the use of language or, to put it differently, that they are often marked by register shifts. In a quest for evidence of such inappropriateness, a linguistic approach to the observation of cartoon translations is the most straightforward starting point for further reflections. Therefore, by focusing on the translated TV cartoons which had first aroused my interest, in the following pages an attempt will be made to provide examples of linguistic oddities in audiovisual translation for children. As I shall focus primarily on register shifts – within one cartoon episode and also, quite strikingly, even within one sentence – in the next two paragraphs I will explain my analytical point of view and the reasons for my swimming against the tide of translation studies.