However, things are starting to change now, with FOX Italia (a subscription-based channel) leading a small “revolution” by airing some of the most popular or anticipated shows on American TV within a much shorter time frame. The second part of Glee’s second season (episodes 2.11 to 2.22), for example, was aired in Italy between January and the beginning of June 2011 in two separate versions: subtitled and dubbed. The subtitled version – much faster and inexpensive to produce than the dubbed one – was aired just a couple of days after it aired in the States (on the Thursday of the same week), while the dubbed version was made available to viewers only one week later. The experiment must have gone well, since FOX Italia is offering the same format again with the third season of the show, which, as the ad campaign once again boasts, is being aired “in contemporanea con gli Stati Uniti” (“simultaneously with the US”) as of September 28th. On that day viewers were able to watch the dubbed version of episode 3.01 and the subtitled version of episode 3.02, only a week and one day after the US airing dates, respectively. According to the FOX Italia web site, the next episodes will be aired in the subtitled version just one day after the States.

While the idea is not completely new (the Late Show with David Letterman has been regularly subtitled and aired within 24 hours for some years now), FOX was the first network to try this with serial TV – in 2010 with Lost and Flash Forward – perhaps realizing their viewership’s increasing need for up-to-date programming. Apart from more specific considerations relating to translation and adaptation, I can think of a number of issues that may in the long run be impacted by this new approach to TV’s international distribution. For example, can a good linguistic and cultural transposition really be achieved for this kind of product in less than 24 hours?

What I find most interesting, though, are the changes that are clearly occurring in the audiovisual translation industry in Italy – and most likely in other non-English-speaking countries that use dubbing as well – and specifically the gradation of different modes of consumption of audiovisual products that are now available to viewers as a consequence of these changes. Viewers in Italy who enjoy Glee, for example, now have a number of different available options to watch the show: they can watch it online or illegally download it in English; they can watch it with the help of amateur, often fan-created subtitles, or fansubs, also available online from different web sites; they can watch it on FOX Italia in the subtitled or dubbed version; or they can watch the dubbed version on Italia Uno, one of the national channels owned by Prime Minister Silvio Berlusconi. Of course, different delivery modes are also related to, among other things, how soon you want to or can watch a given show. This ranges from watching a new episode of a series a few hours after US viewers with the help of fansubs to viewing the dubbed version a few months later on national TV. Considering the fact that some TV series are aired on national networks in the States but on subscription-based channels in Italy and elsewhere in the world, how does this staggering of consumption affect the viewing experience outside the US? While I personally welcome this much-needed diversification in the adaptation options available to Italian viewers, does this imply that audiences will become more fragmented depending on, for example, how much English they know or whether they can afford to pay for cable subscriptions? More broadly, are Italian audiences different from American audiences because they are culturally and linguistically dissimilar or because local distribution choices affect their consumption of a given audiovisual product?

While in the first part of this post I explored how some of Glee’s dubbed Italian promos help frame the show as a sometimes starkly different text, I now move on to consider locally produced promos, where an increased amount of creativity seems to be put forward and the intent is noticed of “domesticating” the show for the target culture.

The promo for Glee’s second season, aired by FOX Italia in the Fall of 2010, brings together scenes from the new episodes, while the voice over informs us that Glee is back with more auditions, nice songs, etc. Some of the key words heard in the voice over appear on screen with a slightly modified Italian spelling, i.e. with a ‘-ee’ instead of ‘-i’ ending, for example: audizionee (auditions), televisionee (lit. televisions), canzonee (songs), etc. While one could argue that using the dubbing actress who lends her voice to Sue Sylvester to promote Glee in such an upbeat, enthusiastic tone might not have been the most consistent choice, the promo clearly stands out for its verbal and visual creativity in superimposing alternative spelling on a grammatical feature of the Italian language, namely the plural noun and adjective ending ‘-i’. Thus the promo can be seen as successfully complying with the show’s verbal playfulness (both in other original promos and in the show itself) which is evident, for example, in the creation of ‘gleek’ and other Glee-inspired neologisms and in Sue’s elaborate and colourful insults. Perhaps building up on Glee’s hugely successful first season, this promo as a whole seems to be more daring than its first season counterparts. In fact, the inclusion of the clip in which Kurt makes explicit reference to himself being gay and Mercedes being black – and to these features making both of them “trendy” – calls attention specifically to some of the minority issues dealt with in the show.

The second case I consider here is the promotional campaign launched by the national network Italia1 when it started airing the first season of the show in January 2011. Italia1, traditionally famous for addressing a younger audience, used its well-known slogan “Italia Uno!” by adapting it to Glee and transforming it into “Gleeitalia Uno!”. In the promo we see a number of TV personalities putting their L-shaped fingers on their foreheads and saying “Gleeitalia Uno!”. The voice over at the end informs us that Glee, the “event TV series of the year”, is coming soon to Italia1.

This promotional campaign is obviously interesting from a number of different angles. First of all, on a linguistic level, it shows a certain amount of creativity in playing with sound and directly attaching the title of the show to the name of the network, thus superimposing new content on an existing – and highly recognizable – promotional campaign for the network. Secondly, a sort of cultural shift seems to be occurring as far as the ‘Loser’ gesture is concerned. While we can safely assume that the majority of Italian viewers will not be familiar with the L-Loser association (see previous post), the Italian VIPs who keep repeating the gesture seemingly unaware of its cultural significance in English also seem to invite Italian audiences to view the ‘L’ in the logo and on their foreheads simply as a visual extension of the /l/ phoneme in the word Glee, thus skipping the cultural significance of the gesture altogether. We could also comment on the use of local celebrities to endorse the show. Although it might make little sense for Italian VIPs to promote a foreign show, we could perhaps see this as mimicking and localizing the same strategy used – perhaps with equally awkward results – by  FOX in the US[1] or by FOX Italia at the beginning of the show’s first season. In this frankly surreal promo, for example, Italian actors, musicians and TV personalities talk about cast choices for a hypothetical Italian version of Glee.

While I can see how the hype surrounding the show even before its airing in Italy might have made Italian distributors confident with using celebrity images to promote the show from the start, I can’t help wondering whether this might have somewhat skewed the ways in which potential Italian viewers have walked onto the Glee phenomenon. Specifically, in addition to the “if you like these celebrities, you’ll like this show” effect normally invited by celebrity endorsement, I would also suggest that the use of mostly young, hip celebrities to promote Glee from its first season in Italy might have created glamorous associations that perhaps clash with the show’s message – or at least with the messages conveyed at the start of the first season in the US – of being confident with who you are even, and especially, if you are perceived as a nerd/loser.

I would like to suggest that many of the promotional strategies adopted for Glee in Italy seem to point in the direction of familiarizing the audience with the show by bringing it closer to the target culture and by closely engaging its fan base. In addition to the promos commented on above, this can be seen in FOX Italia’s idea to advertise Glee’s premiere with a flash mob in a busy shopping mall in Rome a few days before Christmas 2009 and in the recent launch of a web-based competition for the best fan rendition of songs featured in Glee, where winners of the competition will receive tickets to the London Glee concert. It seems safe to say that Glee is being brought (literally, in the case of the flash mob) to Italian viewers through shrewd use of locally produced – albeit sometimes slightly incoherent – paratexts which strategically appeal and reach out to both prospective and established gleeks.

First, though, a preliminary note is in order concerning the pervasiveness of the GLEE logo/title and its implications for translation/adaptation. In particular, it is easy to see how the visual elements embedded in the logo, i.e. a thumb and index finger with the palm outward spelling the letter L, play a crucial role in immediately framing the show for its American viewers, in that Glee is indeed, for the most part, about ‘Losers’.[2] I suggest that the fact that the ‘L-Loser’ correspondence is not immediately recognizable for Italian viewers has yielded mixed results in how the show was framed for this particular target audience and perhaps confronted the Italian audiovisual translators and distributors with the challenge of adopting more creative adaptation strategies elsewhere. Humorously enough, the visual and verbal discrepancy in the use of the L-Loser gesture on screen is made abundantly prominent at the end of the first promo I consider here, where we see a close up of Sue Sylvester putting her two, L-shaped fingers on her forehead and clearly mouthing the word ‘losers’ (literally translated in Italian as ‘perdenti’, where the best functional equivalent would instead be ‘sfigati’, more similar to ‘not cool’).

The promo in question, which is available on the FOX Italia website and was aired before the beginning of the first season in January 2010, appears to be a localized version of a similar, longer English-language promotional video. However, the Italian version seems to have made considerable and crucial changes in the way the characters and, therefore, the show as a whole, are being introduced. The most evident of these changes is of course the fact that all the footage presenting actual scenes from the show were cut out of the promo. While in the English version those scenes serve as an ironic counterpart to each of the characters’ own idealized view of what Glee Club represents for them – for example Rachel getting slushed in the face right after saying “Glee makes you special” or Artie crashing his wheelchair against the wall immediately after claiming “Glee gives me a direction” – the Italian version lacks any of the show’s self-mockery in the representation of these characters. Italian prospective viewers, therefore, might not have been aware of one of the show’s distinctive features, i.e. the ironic depiction of a group of high school kids who are all outsiders in one way or another. The choice to leave out Sue’s politically incorrect suggestion that Will might want to look for potential Glee Club recruits among the Special Ed students is also a crucial – albeit not entirely surprising – omission as far as the edgier humor in the show is concerned. Finally, while the English version uses a fast-paced, funky background music, the Italian promo is accompanied by the signature “Don’t stop believing” cast rendition of Journey’s hit song, which, apart from giving away the pilot episode’s musical finale and key self-realization moment, perhaps also contributes to frame the show from the very beginning as slightly more self-assured and idealistic than its original version would suggest.

The second dubbed promo aired before the first season that I’d like to consider provides an almost identical structure in its English and Italian versions. However, a very basic linguistic problem contributes to convey diverging implications in the translated version.

In the English promo we see some of the characters talking directly at the camera and in a rapid succession either disparagingly stating “You’re a geek!” or proudly admitting “I’m a gleek”. This way we learn, before we even watch the show or know their names, that Rachel, Will, Emma, Mercedes, Tina, Kurt and Artie are ‘gleeks’, i.e. members or supporters of Glee Club, and that Puckerman, Quinn, Principal Figgins, Coach Tanaka and Sue Sylvester are convinced – at least at the beginning of the first season – that the others are nothing but geeks. Of course the blend word ‘gleek’ poorly translates into Italian, with the result that the Italian dubbing gives up trying to find a replacement for it altogether. Undeniably due also to lipsynch issues which in this case did not leave much room for manoeuvre, both ‘gleek’ and ‘geek’ are rendered simply as ‘Glee’, as in the following exchange:

ENG:  I’m a gleek/You’re a geek

IT:     Io sono Glee/Tu sei Glee?

[I am Glee/Are you Glee?]

Needless to say, part of the aggressiveness inherent in the use of the word ‘geek’ and the stark contrast it creates between the popular kids and the losers are downplayed in the pragmatically much weaker Italian question ‘Tu sei Glee?’. Also, the ‘geek’ element embedded in the English version is absent from the Italian one, with the result that Italian viewers are missing the important piece of information by which members of Glee Club are also, almost by definition, ‘geeks’. The accompanying music once again plays a crucial role in framing the show, with the English version using – once again ironically – Beethoven’s dramatic Fifth Symphony and the Italian version once again reverting to the safe and recognizable “Don’t stop believing”. The final result seems to invite different audience expectations, with the American, or English-language, viewers perhaps getting a better sense both of some of the typical high school tensions that will be portrayed in the show and of the ironic and playful commentary on these dynamics that is such a distinctive feature of the show.

[2] See also the cultural significance of Glee Clubs in American High Schools, which does not have an equivalent in the Italian system.