Resubtitling Italian cinema classics: case studies of De Sica’s Ladri di Biciclette (1948) and Fellini’s La Strada (1954)

Abstract

ABSTRACT Retranslation has received far less attention in the audiovisual translation field than in the literary domain, where it is deemed a positive phenomenon. Within the audiovisual field, retranslation tends to be either negatively received or overlooked. While some research over the past decade has focused on redubbing, resubtitling (i.e. comparing two or more sets of subtitles of the same source text, dating back to different periods) has long remained neglected from a retranslation perspective. The present paper aims to address the issue of retranslation using the case study of two Italian films distributed in the UK as an empirical basis: Vittorio De Sica’s Ladri di Biciclette (Bicycle Thieves) and Federico Fellini’s La Strada. Two sets of English subtitles produced for each film, 43 years apart on average, are compared according to a two-level analytical framework, technical and translational. The study shows that, although major improvements can be observed on a technical level, the more modern retranslations seem to depart further from the original dialogue than the older subtitles. Therefore, the notion of ‘retranslation as improvement’ and the retranslation hypothesis are questioned.