Il copione perduto: dalla traduzione all'adattamento per il doppiaggio. ''Corvi e passeri'' (Zheng Junli, 1949)

INTRODUCTION Film dubbing is more than replacing the original soundtrack of a movie with one in a different language. It deals with detecting the nuances of another actor’s performance in order to translate them into feelings, gestures and above all into rhythm. That is why dubbing is regarded as an art and dubbers are often called “voice talents”. The re-voicing system was conceived by Jakob Karol, who was in charge of Paramount’s German films, while he was travelling on an American boat to Europe. The Austrian physicist was looking for a way to screen an American movie in France without waiting for a French cast to re-shoot all its scenes. This episode reveals the international nature of dubbing, which has been a vehicle for language and culture ever since, especially in Italy, where most box-office successes are dubbed movies. Although it was born as a branch of the acting profession, the art of dubbing has developed over the years to become an occupation in its own right, thus increasing the importance of all the professional roles working in the field. The process actually resembles an assembly line, powered thanks to the skills of many professionals, including the adapter. Adapters are also known as dialogue coaches or dialogists; they are the authors of the translated script used by dubbers in the dialogue recording. As the first link in the dubbing chain, adapters play a primary role in the manufacturing of dubbed films, yet their work is often neglected by audiences, who are ultimately often unaware recipients of a language that is deeply influenced by the media. Despite the major contribution that dialogue adaptation has provided to the expansion of both the film-making and translation industries, it began to raise the attention of the academic world in the late 1980s, probably because it is performed ‘behind the scenes’ of the audiovisual market. The recent upsurge of scholarly interest in multimedia studies has led to an increasing amount of research on screen translation. Thanks to these studies, dialogists can draw inspiration from a wide range of examples when faced with problems related to language obstacles and lip synchronization. As most foreign movies come from Europe and the U.S., the above- mentioned discussions mainly deal with films written in the languages spoken in 1