Dubbing Friends: differences between English and Italian

Cultural references in Friends
Friends is a TV show full of cultural references to the American social and historical context. This is one of the reasons why Friends became so popular. However, popularity also meant the transposition of those cultural references from one language into another. In fact, as mentioned in Chapter 1, translation does not exclusively imply carrying across a message from a source language to a target language, but also a culture. Cultural transposition may involve different procedures (Cragie et al. 2015):
1. Cultural borrowing.
2. Cultural transplantation, that is more a rephrasing rather than a translation.
3. Calque, that is a word for word translation from one language into another (skyscraper = grattacielo).
4. Communicative translation, usually adopted with proverbs, clichés, idioms (a standard ST expression is translated with a TL expression that is standard for an equivalent target culture situation).

To these procedures, I would also consider adding:
5. Adaptation, which does not merely focus on providing the exact content from the source text to the target text, but rather modifies the information provided in the source text to make it culturally appropriate for the target audience.
6. Omission.
7. Generalizing translation, that is the use of a more general word (or expression) instead of a more particular.

In the case of Friends, I found exact references to specific elements of the American culture (brands, companies, people, etc.). I have noticed that, during the process of translation from the American version to the Italian one, some of the most commonly used techniques have been adaptation, and adaptation through generalizing translation. The most well-known definition of adaptation as a translation strategy is provided by Vinay and Dalbernet (1958). According to this definition, adaptation has to be considered more as a local rather than a global strategy. It is normally used to achieve an equivalence of situations wherever cultural mismatches are encountered.