[LAUGHING HYSTERICALLY]: The Struggle of Translating Sound Effects, Paralanguage and Music in SDH

In recent years, with the diffusion of streaming platforms and the growing offer of audiovisual products, media accessibility is back in the spotlight. The d/Deaf and hard of hearing audience needs specific tools such as SDH to fully enjoy films and TV series. Indeed, the rendering of the specific labels describing sound effects, music, paralanguage contained in SDH is the focus of this dissertation. The aims of this work are firstly to raise awareness of the needs of the d/Deaf and HoH audience; secondly, to provide a complete review of sound effects, paralanguage and music in SDH both in the academic and professional world; thirdly, to observe the practical actions of translators faced with the challenge of interlingually translate these elements from English into Italian with a master template. Going into detail, the dissertation is composed of four chapters. The first chapter covers the general aspects of AVT and accessibility, including accessibility legislation in some selected States, and illustrates some ongoing controversies regarding the needs of d/Deaf and hard of hearing audience, like the preference for SDH vs. Sign Language. The second chapter focuses on intersemiotic labels (e.g. [grunting]), starting with a review of academic and professional norms, then giving a detailed overview of each element (i.e. sound effects, music, paralanguage), with a dedicated chapter on the issues of interlingually translating these phenomena into SDH. The third chapter, after a brief overview of corpus studies and AVT, presents the corpora built with the SDH of a known streaming platform (especially a parallel corpus of aligned EN>IT SDH), the methodology of the case study, the software used (Sketch Engine) and the queries performed. Finally, the fourth chapter contains the results and discussion of the case study, mainly consisting in a qualitative analysis of specific translational EN>IT strategies based on the concordance lines pertaining to the parallel corpus.