Angela Sileo (a cura di), Audividual Translation as Trans-Creation. A Collection of Essays, Roma, UniversItalia 2021 (Collana Ricerca Continua 7)

This collection of essays, introduced and edited by Angela Sileo – now at her third book (two monographs and this edi-tion) on the subject of dubbing –, is welcome in that it deals with particular and scarcely delved into aspects of dubbing, such as redubbing, multilingualism, the relationship between animated pictures and live-action films, audio-description, re-speaking and other relatively minor aspects of AVT (the um-brella term of specialists for audiovisual translation). Aptly divided into sections, the book starts with two inter-esting chapters devoted to redubs, a diachronic study on the phenomenon of redubbing old and famous films, either for technical reasons, or to bring the translation up to a more modern standard, or to re-insert parts which had been cut for censorship reasons. Of course, as both Sileo and Francesca Raffi notice, audiences react to this procedure in a complex way: sometimes they ‘buy into’ new choices (and therefore happily buy the DVD or Blu-ray, or go to the cinema to see a new version), while sometimes the affection towards voices which have been associated to specific actors for a long time creates a nostalgia which induces viewers to refuse the redub. While Sileo deals with this aspect in some detail, but inserting it in a broader picture, the variety of reactions is studied in de-tail in the long and very informed essay by Raffi, who aptly quotes the few experts (Zanotti, Chaume) who have dealt at length with this phenomenon.