English-language film adaptations and literary style: strategies at play in Italian dubbing and subtitling

The aim of the present article is to describe, both quantitatively and qualitatively, how features of (in)formal language style characterizing the dialogues of English films were handled in dubbing and subtitling translation into Italian. Availing itself of corpus-bases quantitative and qualitative contrastive analyses involving the three corpora (English, dubbing and subtitling) of the films investigated, the study revealed that dubbing and subtitling translators' approaches were quite dissimilar. If subtitlers, on the one hand, remained faithful to the source dialogues, thus preserving in the target text the same degree of (in)formality of the source test, dubbing translators showed a tendency towards maximization of formality in the Italian dialogues. The adoption of two different strategies, which points to the translators' minimum intervention in the case of subtitling, and to greater manipulation in the case of dubbing, was hypothesized to be due to the different features characterizing dubbing and subtitling translation.