Sous-titrer le langage sexuel et vulgaire. Enjeux traductifs entre censure et expressivité

The transfer of vulgar, obscene or sexual language in interlingual subtitles can be an insidious and controversial process where, besides the typical constraints of this AVT modality, the limits of conscious or unconscious (self)censorship come into play. This issue is explored in the present paper, which analyses the Italian subtitling of 21 nuits avec Pattie. Written and directed by the Larrieu brothers, the movie is based largely on tales: from Pattie's licentious stories of her sexual adventures with the men from the village to tales of "necrophilous" Jean's exploits. Released in France in 2015, the comedy was screened at the 17th edition of the European Film Festival, which was held in Lecce from 18th April to 23rd April 2016. For this event, the students of the MA in Translation and Interpretation at the University of Salento worked on the translation into Italian of the English subtitles of the Festival films; I was then invited to revise the Italian subtitles created by the students. Since the film in question is above all "a homage to the word", subtitling was rather challenging due to the need to combine several equally important factors: produce a clear and effective target text while respecting space constraints; mitigate some expressions judged too vulgar or embarrassing; and take care not to dilute the comedy's spirit. This paper will reveal how, alternating different strategies – transposition, paraphrasing, reduction, neutralisation and omission in some cases – as well as some interventions of stylistic moderation and diaphasic variation, the Italian subtitles were toned down compared to the French dialogues and English subtitles, while an attempt was nonetheless made to keep the distinctive features of the film and its characters.