"Translating Australian Cinema for an Italian Audience: The bloody case of Ned Kelly and Picnic at Hanging Rock"

Assuming that films are a powerful new medium through which Australian directors can establish and export their country’s national identity around the world, the aim of this paper is to explore the construction and representation of Australian identity in Italy, through the analysis of dubbing and subtitling choices in the Italian version of Picnic at Hanging Rock (1975) and Ned Kelly (2003). Even though the two films belong to two distinct stages in the Australian film industry, they still represent a pivotal moment in Australian cinema and are worth being analysed in terms of cross-cultural differences emerging between the Australian source text and the Italian version. Due to their themes – the collision between English and Australian culture and the conflict between nature and culture in Picnic at Hanging Rock, the history of the Australian hero par excellence in Ned Kelly – the two works show some linguistic and cultural elements which are worth investigating in detail. More specifically, the paper will illustrate how some geographical and cultural data strongly embedded in the Australian identity are more or less distorted or simply omitted on the basis of the “domesticating” or “foreignizing” strategies used by Italian film translators. Ultimately, a particular emphasis will be placed upon the translation of “the great Australian adjective” and other expletives mainly used by those characters belonging to Australian lower classes, whose linguistic register is often misrepresented in the Italian versions of the two films.