Translating culture-specific references in subtitling: ''This is England'' as a case study

A subtitled film or TV programme performs a communicative function with multiple purposes (Perego 2016: 60).
As reported in the previous section, the need of subtitles arose since the birth of sound cinema. Initially, the subtitle was seen as a means to overcome language and cultural barriers but later it also assumed other functions, in order to meet the needs of a wide range of audiences. For this reason, many types of subtitles do exist today. There are several parameters by which subtitles may be subdivided, but the most used is the linguistic one. Based on this criterion, the subtitles can be classified into intralingual and interlingual.

Intralingual subtitling
Intralingual subtitling refers to the partial or total transcription of the original soundtrack of the film. This transcription is made in the same language of the original film (Petillo 2008: 119) and it is addressed to two different types of recipients: deaf or hard-of-hearing people and L2 learners. Referring to deaf and hard-of-hearing people the original content is just partially transcribed, whereas intralingual subtitling for L2 learners refers to a total transcription of the original dialogues. When the transcription is integral the message transmission quality is "vertical", as it just transposes within the same language an oral text into a written text without making any changes (Perego 2016: 61). This concept is expressed by the figure in the following page:

Interlingual subtitling
Interlingual subtitling refers instead to the translation from a language into another. It is the most widely used type of subtitling and it is also the one the analysis of the third chapter will be focused on. In this case the message transmission quality is "diagonal" as it "crosses over from source-language (SL) speech to target-language (TL) writing" (Gottlieb 2000: 17) as illustrated below:
As well as intralingual subtitling, even interlingual subtitling can be directed to L2 learners. Several studies have shown the effectiveness of this type of subtitling, called "reversed subtitling", which consists in having the L1 in the soundtrack and the L2 in the subtitles.