'Yes, Your Honor'/ 'Sì, Vostro Onore'. Legal dramas, the popularisation of legal discourse and dubbing

Legal dramas play a key role in the popularisation of legal discourse. Experts are usually consulted to ensure that story lines are legally sound, and dialogues are convincing representations of both symmetrical communication between peers and asymmetrical communication between legal professionals and their clients. The need to strike a balance between accuracy and accessibility motivates the use of popularisation strategies to help the audience understand legal content. Although the primary function of legal dramas is to provide entertainment, they also contribute to informing the audience about the legal system of the country where the story is set. Thus, the translation of such audiovisual products for foreign audiences entails not just translation between two languages, but also between two cultures and legal systems. This paper presents a corpus-based study of legal references from selected episodes of The Good Wife, a popular US legal drama. The English dialogues were transcribed along with their matching Italian dubbed dialogues. Then, the legal references were identified in both expert-expert and in expert-non-expert interactions in the original dialogues, and any clarifying strategies aimed at TV viewers were detected. Finally, the Italian dialogues were analysed to identify the strategies used to convey such references to Italian viewers.