The Bewildering Role of Censorship: Gender Narratives and Other Stories in TV Series Translation

The «phenomenology of the relationship between censorship and translation» requires an in-depth investigation, which, as it will be argued, should ideally start from the awareness that Translation Studies scholars have recently insisted upon, as regards the need to connect linguistic or translation studies to other extra-textual discourses. Censorship is one of the possible factors that characterise a context or a society and it can be endorsed through translation, which thus acquires political value. The aim of this article is to investigate the link that binds censorship to translation, focussing specifically on the gender related domain. The analysis I will present concerns TV series and more specifically Will & Grace. TV series are among the most popular kinds of text, and they can greatly affect people’s knowledge construction. For this reason, they play a social role and are an interesting domain of investigation. The study aims at identifying if censorship is at play in TV series translation, as regards gender-related issues on TV series and, consequently, at exploring the stories told. As is widely known, Italy imports many American TV series, which undergo processes of choice and translation. In TV series translation, these procedures are even more significant given the wide reach of these texts, which may turn the translators’ choices into more substantial social actions. Studies show how the general trend of TV series translation in Italy frequently encompasses omission, deletion or downgrading of certain items especially when they concern sexuality, religion, or bad language. As I will argue, a new topic or domain needs to be added to the more ‘traditional’ ones, namely that of family.