Audiovisual Translation: a cinematic journey between Italian and English

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INTRODUCTION 
 
The audiovisual translation was born during the 1920s, when the first steps were made towards an 
adaptation of foreign products so that they could be available in other non-speaking countries of 
the source language. Thanks to the developing of Translation Studies, this field of translation was 
considered in the 1990s, when there was an uncontrollable growth of English and American 
cinematic productions into mostly other European countries. The practice of translation has 
interested scholars and enthusiasts for dozens of years, distinguishing itself as one of the main 
branches of the linguistic sciences. Thanks to the advent of new technologies, translation has 
undergone changes, mutating, and adapting to the art forms that have developed with the new 
media, being influenced by the largest component in the public domain: television. The 
audiovisual media imposed its presence worldwide, giving birth to the necessity of translating the 
dialogues into several languages, so that an ever-widening audience could enjoy them.  
In the long run, this has led our country to have a long tradition in the art of dubbing and to make 
it the country with the highest rate of use. Consequently, people no longer have the perception 
that the film is shot in another language, and this is due to the skill and hard work of all those all 
those people who, by following certain rules, make this is possible. Speaking of those who work 
behind the screen, it is important to say that there are various figures who translate, adapt and 
bring the finished product to the theatres and cinemas. From a purely linguistic point of view, we 
find the translator and the dialogist, also known as the “adaptor”, who are responsible of 
translating the scripts and providing a completely new version in the translated language. The 
work then passes to the dubbing houses where between dubbing directors, dubbing assistants, 
voice actors and technicians, the finished product is ready for cinema and television.  
As the linguist and professor of Translation Studies Díaz Cintas states in one of his books about 
AVT: 
 
“[…] We come across them at home, in our workplace, on public transport, in libraries, bars, 
restaurants and cinemas. We spend a fair amount of hours watching screens and consuming 
audiovisual programmes to carry out our work, to develop and enhance our professional and 
academic careers, to enjoy ourselves and to obtain information. It would not be an exaggeration 
to talk about the ubiquity of the image in our time and age. […]”
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 Díaz Cintas, Audiovisual Translation: Subtitling (2006), 8.
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According to this definition, it can be stated that it is true that people are nowadays surrounded 
and stimulated by the continuous presence of audiovisual products in their surroundings, and this 
means that a meticulous analysis of this thriving area of translation must be carried out.  
In the present dissertation, the author is going to explain the cultural background which made 
possible the growth of the multimedia translation and how it affected Italy. The author is going to 
analyse and list the various strategies and difficulties that a translator could face during his work, 
since as it is obvious, translation is not a mathematic science, even if it is made of essential rules 
which must be respected. The present dissertation is focused on the differences among English 
and Italian, and how these affect the work of a translator, who should respect certain norms in 
order to offer a correct translation to the target public. These differences, as it will be seen further 
in this presentation, are able to force the translator into making some arguable choices. 
The multi-semiotic text involved and analysed in the present thesis can be very challenging both 
for beginners and experts in the translation field, so some big academics are going to be 
mentioned, including their theories on the matter and the solutions proposed by them for present 
and future translators. It is important to underline that such translation is nowadays one of the 
most required and diffused, thanks to the development of streaming platforms such as Netflix, 
Prime Video, HBO, Fox and so on. Since these platforms are daily used and enjoyed by a big 
amount of both young and adult people, the language of these audiovisual products needs to be 
adapted to the linguistic evolutions that such language experiences. 
Two of the most diffused techniques used nowadays in the audiovisual area are subtitling and 
dubbing, which will be later explained in detail in the following chapters of this dissertation, in 
which the author will make clear how different the result of the techniques is on the final product. 
Among the various possibilities for the translator to offer a comprehensible and correct 
translation, the choice was to analyse the theory of “explicitation” in subtitling, i.e., that 
procedure triggered by a certain cultural gap, which will have the result of an adaptation of the 
original to the cultural and linguistic system of the target audience.  
The aim of the present dissertation is to show the differences among the various techniques used 
in the audiovisual area and also to highlight the weak and strong points during this specific 
analysis, to underline how different a movie or a cinematic product can result with just a few 
expedients. Furthermore, another aim is to show the variance in the strategies chosen by the 
translators in different cases: this means underlining how certain issues and problems faced 
during the subtitling were dealt with if the translator adopted certain translation strategies and 
why he or she did so.
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Firstly, in Chapter 1 of the present dissertation, the author is going to give an overview of the 
history of the audiovisual translation, including the birth of cinema and the most important 
cinematic tendencies established in Italy after World War II.  In addition, many scholars, and 
experts in the field of the audiovisual translation are going to be cited and how they contributed to 
the growth of this type of translation in the past 30 years, for example Yves Gambier, Jorge Diaz 
Cintas or the Italian author Elisa Perego and many others. 
Secondly, in Chapter 2, the author is going to introduce the element of analysis, i.e. the movie 
“Benvenuti al Sud”, an Italian film set in the regions of Lombardy and Campania (respectively in 
the north and south of Italy). After briefly introducing the plot of the movie, the author is going to 
present some scenes extracted from the movie and explain in detail which were the strategies 
adopted by the original translator, who was not a professional expert in the field, but rather 
someone who decided to subtitle the movie without specific competences, which in translation 
setting is known as “fansubbing”.  
Lastly, in Chapter 3, the author is going to presents its own alternatives and proposals to the 
already existing fansubbing, trying to shape the translation in a more target-oriented version, in 
which some source elements (such as realia, word plays, dialect) are adapted to the English 
language, which is widely known to be less redundant compared to Italian or Spanish or romance 
languages in general. Since the movie is set both in the north and south of the Italian peninsula, 
the accent and dialect are strong and important components of the language and this is the reason 
why, in the final chapter, the author is going to try a different approach compared to the fansub 
translation, trying to make it more inclusive towards the Neapolitan.  
The purpose of the present work is to show how the whole translation and perception of a movie 
script can change with some tricks, paying more attention to the language, the translation 
strategies adopted and how the cultural references change from source to target language, based 
on the receiving audience. Another important concept that will be debated by the author is the 
purpose of the translation, or as it is known in the Translation Studies field, the so called 
“Skopostheorie”
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, meaning that before actually starting the work, the translator has to understand 
and respect the aim of a specific text in both source and target languages. To do so, it is 
fundamental to consider the various alternatives offered by a language, for example equivalent 
words, borrowings, calques, foreignizing and so on. As the Russian American linguist Jakobson 
states, 
 
 
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 It is a technical term, coined by Hans Vermeer, German linguist, representing the aim of a translation. Its 
etymology is linked to the Greek, in which “σκοπός” (skopos) means “purpose”.
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 “[…] translation involves two equivalent messages in two different codes. Whenever there is 
deficiency, terminology may be qualified and amplified by: loanwords or loan-translations, 
neologism or semantic shifts, and circumlocutions. It is always necessary to aim at equivalence of 
pragmatic meaning, if necessary, at the expense of semantic equivalence […]”
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. 
 
For each type of translation, there are very specific constraints that must be respected by the 
translator, like the limited amount of characters that can be used in each line, the harmony 
between frames, subtitles and audio and other rules that will be analysed further in the present 
dissertation.  
To conclude and sum up, the author will consider the multi-semiotic nature of the audiovisual 
text, meaning that setting, characters, traditions, and roots of the characters in the movie 
“Benvenuti al sud” will be brought to light to give a whole panoramic about the differences 
between the source and target product. By giving a new proposal for certain dialogues of the 
movie, the author will also try to explain why certain choices are more suitable for the subtitling 
and why others simply do not work well with it, by giving context and trying to “explicitate” 
certain elements essential to the comprehension of the whole work.  
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
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 Jakobson, On Linguistic Aspects of Translation (1959), 233-234.
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CHAPTER ONE 
 
 
AUDIOVISUAL TRANSLATION: AN OVERVIEW 
 
1.1 Chronological references and first studies 
 
The audiovisual translation is referred to film, tv programmes, tv series and multimedia 
translation. In particular, a text can be defined audiovisual when those three parts are involved: 
the verbal component, the spoken and the visual elements
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. This branch of translation was born 
many years later the birth and growth of the sound films during the 1930s, and therefore many 
academics and experts of this field define the AVT as a recent discovery, since it was born during 
the 1990s to increase the distribution of the cinematographic products all over the world. The first 
films were called “silent films
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” since none of the actors actually spoke during the movie, they 
just mimed, and the acts were accompanied by music in the background to make it more pleasant 
for the public. These kinds of films were considered as universal, since they could be easily 
interpreted by anyone all over the world just by signs and body language, irrespective of the 
cultural background of the target public. Think for example to Charlie Chaplin’s films, which are 
still nowadays incredibly famous and seen as milestones. 
In 1925, the worldwide known Warner Bros (or WB) an American film and entertainment studio, 
started facing the problem of the languages barrier which led to a crucial difficulty in distributing 
the products in other countries outside the USA. Consequently, the cinematography world and 
market tried to find some solutions
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 to this problem: 
• The actors had to film many times in different languages the same movie, so that the plot and the 
main characters would be the same but, in this case, everyone would have had their native 
language version to watch. This was of course expensive, so another solution was needed. 
• After this experiment, the same movies were remade from actors proceeding from the countries 
where the movies would have been distributed, so that the language would be natural and even 
some aspects would be adapted to the target culture. 
 
10
 Diadori, Teoria e tecnica della traduzione. Strategie, testi e contesti (2012), 221. 
11
 A silent film is a film with no audible dialogue). Though silent films convey narrative and emotion visually, 
various plot elements (such as a setting or era) or key lines of dialogue may, when necessary, be conveyed by the 
use of title cards. The first silent film reproduced in the Italian cinemas was “The Jazz Singer” in 1927, which 
reached a remarkable success both in Italy and in other countries in Europe. 
12
 Paolinelli, Di Fortunato, Tradurre per il doppiaggio. La trasposizione linguistica dell’audiovisivo: teoria e pratica 
di un’arte imperfetta (2012), 1.