La traduzione audiovisiva per Concorto Film Festival: proposta di sottotitolaggio di due cortometraggi

The idea behind this thesis stems from the internship in translation and subtitling performed from April to August 2021 for the international short film festival Concorto Film Festival. This internship program provides selected students with the opportunity to put the translation skills acquired in their bachelor’s degree to the test, by adapting them to the needs of audiovisual translation. Film directors provide files with English subtitles, which interns turn into new, bilingual (ita-eng) subtitle files with the software Subtitle Workshop. The new bilingual files are eventually used for the screening of the films and need therefore to comply with the guidelines established by Concorto Film Festival. Using as a case study the subtitles created for the two German short films “Der natürliche Tod der Maus” (“The Natural Death of a Mouse”) (2020) by Katharina Huber and “Wenn ich tanze, wackelt die Welt” (“When I Dance, the Earth Trembles”) (2020) by Otto Lazić-Reuschel, this thesis examines subtitling as an application of the practice of translation. The first chapter introduces Concorto Film Festival, the two selected short films and their directors. The second chapter briefly introduces audiovisual translation and describes the needs and features of subtitling. The third chapter analyses the strategies that have been adopted to solve the technical problems mentioned in the second chapter and the translative problems posed by linguistic and cultural elements. Finally, the file attached to this thesis includes the Italian and English subtitles of the two short films and the transcript of the original German audio.