A Movie Title is Born. Un’analisi del fenomeno italiano della mancanza di trasposizione dei titoli filmici anglofoni premiati agli Oscar

ABSTRACT This paper aims to analyze the phenomenon of the translation of film titles from English to Italian and how the various translation techniques have evolved over the course of history, with an eye to the titles being unchanged from the original. For this purpose, a dedicated database has been created. It is composed of the 816 films awarded in the 92 editions of the Academy Awards, excluding all films in languages other than English, documentaries and short films of any kind. The analyzed sample is very diverse: it includes movies released from 1927 to 2019, belonging to 20 different film genres and, for the most part, adaptations from written works. The first chapter provides an overview of the history of Hollywood and the Academy Awards, followed by a description of how this world is perceived by Italian audiences. Secondly, the element of the film title and the techniques that can be used to translate it from English into Italian are presented. In addition, considerations are also made on the question of proper names and the film adaptation. Chapter two, on the other hand, describes the methodology for creating the title database and all the classifications that it is composed of: award categories, film genres, adaptation types and translation techniques from English to Italian. Lastly, chapter three focuses mainly on the six translation techniques (literal translation, translation with variations, new creation, unchanged title, title with subtitle and alternative title in English). Through the interpretation of graphs created using the collected data to analyze their distribution by genre and time, the last section undertakes an in-depth study of each translation technique.