The editing of anime – Japanese cartoons – is a process through which the product is altered to be made appropriate for the public. Such a practice is quite common in the entire western world, and Italy is no exception. Japanese anime are not conceived only for an audience of children, and there are different types of products aimed at audiences of different ages. In Japan there are proper broadcasting time slots for each age group, starting in the morning until late at night, and anime are shown during the various slots according to their characteristics. In Italy, on the contrary, cartoons are generally considered a product targeted exclusively at children, and even those anime which were originally conceived for an older audience are broadcast during the protected time slot. This is mainly due to economic reasons, as the advertising of products and gadgets related to such cartoons is usually undertaken during the afternoon slot. Consequently, since these anime are broadcast in a protected time slot, they have to comply with certain canons of content and language. Censorship thus takes place both at the visual and at the verbal level: scenes considered inappropriate (because they are too violent or too sensual) are removed from the story, the plot is often changed, the text is frequently domesticated in its references to Japanese culture, and the language is flattened (every reference to the semantic field of death, for example, is to be avoided, and vulgar or strong expressions/interjections are turned into unlikely neutral utterances). Italian translators actively participate in the editing of anime: as they are the first ones to actually see the episodes, they are supposed to report any ambiguous element that they come across (which will then be removed during the phase of post-production), and they perform the verbal censorship, manipulating the language as is expected by the commissioners. The Italian association ADAM (Associazione Difesa Anime e Manga) has been actively fighting against this kind of censorship since 1997, but the main free terrestrial channels still continue to edit all the anime that they broadcast.

Ilaria PARINI graduated in Translation in 1996 from the Advanced School of Modern Languages for Interpreters and Translators of the University of Bologna at Forlí (Italy), with a thesis on the Italian dubbing of Quentin Tarantino’s films. She then attended postgraduate courses in Multimedia Translation and in Modern Languages Teaching at the University of Bologna. From 1999 to 2003 she worked as a translator of cartoons (mainly, Japanese anime) for the dubbing company Merak Film, Cologno Monzese, Milan. From 2002 to 2004 she worked as a translator of romance novels for Harlequin Mondadori. Since 2003 she has been working as a contract lecturer in English at the University of Milan. She is currently enrolled in a doctoral programme in English Linguistics and Translation at the University of Milan, where she is investigating the variety spoken by Italian-American gangsters in American films and in Italian dubbing. She has published articles on the Italian dubbing of Quentin Tarantino’s films, on the transposition of the Italian-American variety in Italian dubbing, on the relationship between functional equivalence and domestication strategies in film translation, on the English translation of Ammaniti’s “Ti prendo e ti porto via”, and a book on medical English for Healthcare Professionals.