Analysing redubs: Motives, agents, and audience response

The term redub refers to a second or subsequent dubbed version of the same audiovisual product in the same target language. While the phenomenon has started to proliferate with the rapid expansion of the home-video market and has now reached considerable proportions, research on redubs is still limited. This paper aims to demonstrate the relevance of retranslation to audiovisual translation research and, more specifically, to examine the phenomenon of redubbing. Based on diachronic and synchronic data, this paper offers an analysis of the extent and proportions of the phenomenon in in the Italian context taking into account motives, agents, and viewers’ response. A small corpus of redubbed films is analysed in order to examine the process and effects of redubbing, the relationship between first and subsequent dubbings, the type of changes made in redubs, as well as the translational norms at work. The overall aim of the study is to test the so called Retranslation Hypothesis.