Subtitling Dialect and Culture-bound Language

Audiovisual translation and subtitling represent a challenging research area within the field of Translation Studies, because of their complex intersemiotic layers. The aim of the research is to analyse the translation strategies used for the transfer of the connotative nuances of linguistic and cultural varieties such as dialects, with specific reference to the transformations that take place in the passage from spoken oral dialogue to written language. The complete omission of dialect in translation would deprive the target text of one of the essential components of the source language, but, if this is not the case, what are the possibilities left to the translator? The article is going to focus on the translation of dialect in the subtitles of successful Italian films such as Nuovomondo (Crialese, 2006), Nuovo Cinema Paradiso (Tornatore, 1988) and one episode of the TV series Il commissario Montalbano (Sironi, 2008).