Licence to Laugh: the Italian Flavour of 007’s Humour

In a 2001 interview, Ken Loach said: “Dubbing kills humour”. Undoubtedly, the translation of humour is a difficult challenge for the audio-visual translator, who has to adapt the final product to socio-cultural contexts considerably different from the original one. The present paper aims to examine the case of the 007 franchise, whose extraordinary and long-standing success in Italy is actually greatly due to James Bond’s humour. Working on a corpus of selected scenes from the 22 film transcripts of the 007 films released so far (1962-2008), I will compare in a diachronic perspective the original versions with the Italian-dubbed ones, in an attempt to explore the extent to which the translation of 007’s humour entails a lexico-semantic variation. In particular, I will analyse some of the “best” and “worst” examples of transposition and recontextualization of humour in terms of visual-verbal cohesion and translator invisibility.