Sub-tle sub-titling: media-ting culture and meaning through concision

This study analyses audio-visual translation through subtitling, a type of adaptation that involves a transformation in the mode: from the oral mode of the source text into the written mode of the target text. For this study, a Corpus of ten Italian films has been taken into analysis: the films analysed are the most recent productions which have been released in the last five years, i.e. from the year 2000 to the year 2005, and for which there is an international version on DVD. The Corpus consists of the following audio-visual texts: 1. Andata e Ritorno 2. Baci e abbracci 3. Io No 4. La finestra di fronte 5. L'amore ritorna 6. Le fate ignoranti 7. L'ultimo bacio 8. Ma che colpa abbiamo noi 9. Ricordati di me 10. Santa Maradona The versions of the films analysed are those which have been made available for the foreign market, therefore with English subtitles: for the analysis of the audio-visual texts in question, a slightly modified Multimodal Transcription, as devised by Thibault and Baldry (2000). The purpose of this study is to show how the English subtitling of the Italian films listed above is not merely a translation but rather an adaptation from both a graphic, linguistic and cultural point of view focusing mainly on the cultural mediation process and the problems involved in it. Furthermore, this study will show how in the subtitling process of the above-mentioned films, differently from what it may be thought, the many deletions, decimations and condensations of the spoken utterances do not result in unnecessary semantic loss, since the concision processes work mainly on either inter-semiotic or intra-semiotic redundancies.