ABSTRACT
This chapter enquires into the representation of foreign characters in The Simpsons, Family Guy and Outrageous Acts of Psych in order to identify how the socio-cultural and linguistic dimensions of the original characterizations are reformulated and adapted for Italian receivers. In order to prompt humorous responses, the original representations are based on the strategy of ‘power distance’ as well as on cognitive contrasts of the possible/impossible and expected/unexpected types, whereas the Italian versions resort to regionalisms, diatopic/diastratic language varieties and stereotypical reproduction of non-native pronunciation. This chapter will explore the levels of linguistic and functional equivalence achieved by the retextualizations, along with the ideological nature of the specific adaptation strategies, which stem from the translators’ ideological interpretation of the source-text semantic and communicative dimensions. Finally, the analysis will also enquire into the extent to which the target scripts produce non-natural representations from a multimodal perspective because of the interaction between their visual, acoustic and verbal features.
