The aim of this paper is to explore how multilingual films are translated for an Italian audience. Since multilingual films often portray multi-ethnic contexts and a mixture of cultures and languages, an important feature of such films is their linguistic and cultural variation. Culture-specific traits, sociolinguistic varieties, the shift from one language to another or the use of a specific language are meaningful aspects of multilingual films which are linked to culture and which are among the most challenging features for audiovisual translators. The translation of this type of films should thus attempt to transfer all these different linguistic and cultural nuances for another audience. This paper focuses on the rendering of culture-specific references, communication in different languages, the phenomenon of code-switching and the presence of sociolinguistic varieties of English, that is, regional dialects and ethnolects for an Italian audience. The films chosen for analysis are set in contemporary Britain, the USA and India, and contain characters belonging to different ethnicities and speaking different languages.
This empirical study will be carried out on a small bilingual parallel corpus of original, dubbed and subtitled film dialogues, which will be tagged for culture-specific references and instances of code-switching, geographical dialects and ethnolects. The use of the concordance program ParaConc will help to extract quantitative data, to observe regularities or divergences in translation behaviour, to identify translation strategies and to provide a more accurate comparison between dubbed and subtitled versions.
The paper will attempt to answer the following questions: What are the translation strategies adopted to deal with cultural references? Are there regularities in translation behaviour? Are culture-specific traits manipulated and domesticated, or retained and emphasised? How are multiple languages, sociolinguistic varieties and code-switching rendered in dubbing and subtitling? Does dubbing tend to domesticate foreign features? When is a foreignising approach chosen? Is there a linguistic and cultural ‘flattening’ in the dubbed Italian versions? How is the image of the foreign culture(s) constructed through dubbing? Do subtitles convey a different image?
Although Italy is a dubbing country, in recent years there has been an increase in the amount of audiovisual products which are subtitled for satellite TV and DVDs. However, the dubbed and subtitled versions are often translated by different teams of people, and the quality of Italian subtitles has been criticised (see Paolinelli & Di Fortunato 2005: 39-40). Paolinelli wonders about the quality of many subtitled products because of the need to reduce costs: “what is going to become of quality in a deregulated market of this sort?” (2004: 173-174). Through the comparative analysis of dubbed and subtitled versions of the same films an additional aim of this paper is to investigate how far the two translation modes differ in their treatment of cultural traits, and to assess whether the quality of the Italian subtitles of the films under study is really poorer than that of the dubbed dialogues.

References
Paolinelli, M. and Di Fortunato, E. (2005). Tradurre per il doppiaggio. La trasposizione linguistica dell'audiovisivo: teoria e pratica di un'arte imperfetta. Milano: Hoepli.

Vincenza MINUTELLA is a researcher in English Language and Translation, Facoltà di Lingue e Letterature Straniere, Università di Torino (Italy). She obtained a PhD in Translation Studies from the University of Warwick (UK). She has carried out research on theatre translation, film adaptations of literary texts and Shakespeare translation, focusing in particular on ‘Romeo and Juliet’, which is analysed in her PhD thesis 'Reclaiming Romeo and Juliet: Italian translations for page, stage and screen'. Her current research interests are audiovisual translation and the use of computerised corpora in Translation Studies. Recent publications include ‘Translating for dubbing from English into Italian’ (Celid, Torino, 2009) and ‘“What’s in a name?” References to women in Romeo and Juliet and their translation into Italian’, in A. Martelli and V. Pulcini (eds), Investigating English with Corpora. Studies in Honour of Maria Teresa Prat (Polimetrica, Monza, 2008).