DOPPIAGGIO E FANSUBBING. IL CASO DI “GREY’S ANATOMY” CON ANALISI CONTRASTIVA DEI COPIONI

Grey’s Anatomy is a well known tv show created and directed by Shonda Rhimes which made its debut on March 27 2005 on the American Broadcasting Company better known as ABC. The series is considered a medical drama that is a sub-genre of the drama genre characterised by fictional plots and themes. Other than the medical sub-genre there are also detective, crimes etc... As far as it concerns medical drama, it saw the light in the Fifties and deals with doctors and everything related. To make medical dramas more appealing for fans, producers play with the private life of doctors and create many relationships and mix them later on the show. This kind of television show has got its recognition thanks to Dr. Kildare even if the very first drama, City Hospital, dates back to 1951. Casualty is the longest running medical drama aired in 1986 in Great Britain while General Hospital achieved the title of longest running soap opera of the genre airing in 1963. Grey’s Anatomy gained the honour to be nominated as the longest running prime time. According to what George Ikkos said during a BBC interview in 2012, this sub-genre own its success to the characters who are often represented as everyday citizens with brilliant careers, which allows viewers to rely on them easily. The genre is loved by the audience and this is why these dramas are now material for medical training. Ghobain described the show as “an authentic source of medical English and English for medical purposes”. (p.3 of “A Proposal for Medical-Drama- Based course for ESP students” by Elham Abdullah Ghobain). Medical dramas can be seen as a linguistic product because they use new linguistic forms, medical jargon and specific scientific terminology allowing a full immersion into the narrative. In addition, the attendance and contribution of real life doctors in the screenwriting team make the narrative more accurate but without losing the entertainment, the base of television content. It can be said that the specific language of healthcare is Medical English and it has its own rules. It is composed of slangs, acronyms, colloquialisms that common everyday people can not understand completely. Abbreviations, acronyms, and other medical terms are usually listed and used to give assistance to patients faster and easier. This specific scientific language is so wide that contains cases such as “False friends”; an example is found with the word “formula” whose common definition in the dictionary describes it as “a set form of words to use in a ceremony or ritual; a group of symbols; a general fact, rule, or principle expressed usually in mathematical symbols; etc...” (dictionary.com) The medical definition of the word instead, defines the word “formula” as “a recipe or prescription giving method and proportions of ingredients for the preparation of some material (as a medicine); or a symbolic expression showing the composition or constitution of a chemical substance”. Other characteristics that show up from Medical English is the presence of “Double terminology” which is nothing more than two or more words pointing out the same thing but adapted to different context. Some clear examples are: pharynx (throat), larynx (voice box), trachea (windpipe). By analyzing the last example, trachea – windpipe the former is used in medical environment because of the history and etymology of it since it derives from Latin which was the language of science, so all medical texts were written in Latin.