When subtitling a film for a hearing and seeing audience, the subtitler can rely on the presence of the information communicated visually and aurally by the invariant part of the AV text. However, the fact remains that some nonverbal signs belonging to such codes as the paralinguistic or the kinesic may well be culture-specific and are hence likely to get lost in translation. I would go further and argue that even when this is not the case, the subtitled version might benefit from the inclusion in the verbal target text of some of the nonverbal characteristics of the source text, especially when these are an integral part to characterisation.
Following Chaume’s (2004: 194) suggestion, it would be interesting to verify whether the explicitation of such nonverbal signs as the alternants (in Poyatos’s (1997) sense) through replacement with linguistic ones, can be seen as a tendency in the chosen corpus. Although Chaume refers primarily to a dubbing situation, I intend to focus my talk on subtitling, where the verbal element might have been chosen, say, to preserve the same phatic function as that of the original paralinguistic sign. I would also like to look into whether some specific strategies, such as marked thematisation (in the case of an English TL, through clefting), are adopted to help transfer some of the features conveyed in the ST by means of intonation. Finally, I will discuss how the illocutionary force of nonverbal signs is dealt with. Is it incorporated into the subtitled version, or does the subtitler rely on a big cooperation effort on the part of an audience whose nonverbal codes might be very different from those of the original ones?
This paper aims to explore the above-mentioned issues through an analysis of material taken from a number of films by Federico Fellini subtitled into English. Why the focus on Fellini? As Bondanella (1992: 20) puts it, Fellini believed that “the visual image of a film narrative must take precedence over any verbal dialogue”. In particular in Fellini’s mature production, most noticeably as from La dolce vita (1960), this notion goes in parallel with his wish to create “a new kind of cinematic narrative that would abandon the traditional emphasis on plot and story line and concentrate on supporting the narrative by visual images and narrative rhythm” (ibid.:134). From an audiovisual translation perspective it would be extremely interesting and informative to investigate if and how this reflects in the English subtitled versions of Fellini’s films.

References
Bondanella, P. (1992). The Cinema of Federico Fellini. Princeton: Princeton University Press.
Chaume, F. (2004). Cine y traducción. Madrid: Cátedra.
Poyatos, F. (1997). "Aspects, problems and challenges of nonverbal communication in literary translation". In Fernando Poyatos (ed.) Nonverbal Communication and Translation: New Perspectives and Challenges in Literature, Interpretation and the Media. Amsterdam/Philadelphia: John Benjamins.

Adriana TORTORIELLO is a qualified translator and subtitler who has been working in the field of translation, more specifically that of subtitling, for over 15 year. For many years she was the head of the Italian Department of a major subtitling company based in London, where she set up the department and subsequently recruited and trained a pool of in-house and freelance subtitlers. She now works as a freelance translator and as a part-time lecturer. She has been lecturing in the field of audiovisual translation since 2000, notably at the University of Westminster, where she was the Leader of the Subtitling Module of the MA in Bilingual translation, and at the University of Roehampton, where her lectures and tutorials are part of the Master in Audiovisual Translation. She is now a visiting lecturer (Audiovisual Translation, Language and Translation) as well as a PhD student at Imperial College London.