SAT, BLT, Spirit Biscuits, and the Third Amendment

On average, Italian television viewers are exposed to more than 350 hours of dubbed programmes per week that are aired on national terrestrial TV channels and which contain a wide array of references to all the specific aspects and features of the source languages and cultures. Do they perceive the countless ‘culture bumps’ (Leppihalme 1997) contained in translated audiovisual products? What do they make of such references? In order to provide an answer to these questions, we carried out a large-scale study which by means of an e-questionnaire linked to 170 excerpts collected from 300 hours of recorded fictional dubbed material set out to investigate Italian audiences’ perception of dubbing.