The Rendering of Multilingual Occurrences in Netflix’s Italian Dub Streams: Evolving Trends and Norms on Streaming Platforms

Abstract

Given the vast scholarly attention paid to multilingualism on traditional media over the years, it seems timely to focus on streaming platforms. This paper sets out to identify potential norms for the rendering of multilingual occurrences in the localised content of Netflix series. It also seeks to explore whether streaming translation practices related to multilingualism differ from the consolidated norms and practices for TV and cinema content. The chosen data sample consists of the Italian dub streams of five TV Netflix-produced shows featuring multilingualism as a main characteristic. The strategies and techniques adopted in each series are singled out, quantified, and labelled according to a combination of taxonomies. These include dubbing, revoicing, subtitling, part-subtitling, diegetic interpreting, unchanged speech transfer, and no translation. A wider analysis is also carried out across all the data sample to draw patterns on a macro level. The findings reveal a strong tendency to mark and preserve multilingualism, in line with Netflix’s own policies and dubbing specifications. Transfer unchanged combined with subtitles emerges as the most recurrent strategy, while the dub-over strategy accounts for 13% of the multilingual occurrences in the data sample. Extensive neutralisation is therefore not encountered. That said, a certain degree of overlap between multilingual translation norms on Netflix and conventional Italian dubbing practices (which tend to neutralise) can still be observed.