THE ITALIAN CINEMA DISTRIBUTED IN THE UK DURING THE POST-WAR PERIOD:A DIACHRONIC STUDY OF FILM SUBTITLING

Abstract

In order to try to fill a gap in the existing literature on audiovisual translation, the general aim of this interdisciplinary project is to offer a diachronic study of film subtitling, mainly focusing on the Italian cinema distributed in the UK during the post-war period. More specifically, after having introduced in Chapter 1 the background as well as the disciplinary motivations for the proposed research, which will be further discussed in Chapter 2, this work may be divided into two main sections. The first one starts in Chapter 3, which traces the evolution of subtitling as translation practice, with a special focus on changing conventions at technical and linguistic level (punctuation and other conventions), from the silent era to the arrival of sound, thus creating a bridge between AVTS and Film Studies in a diachronic perspective. This link will be further strengthen in Chapter 4, which explores Italian cinema during the post-war period, contextualising the titles produced in those years within the social, cultural, political and economic context. The distribution of Italian films produced after the Second World War within the UK market will then be explored, with special emphasis on the choice of audiovisual translation modality adopted to distribute them within the British market, and on the preference of subtitling over dubbing for the so-called Italian art films. This first section, in addition to having explored film subtitling and Italian 12 cinema in a diachronic perspective, drawing on both Audiovisual Translation Studies and Film Studies, has also served as basis for the second section of the present work: the construction and analysis of a corpus of Italian films distributed in the UK, comprising three different subtitled versions for each title, with a 46-year time span, on average: Il Miracolo (Roberto Rossellini 1949), Ladri di Biciclette (Vittorio De Sica 1949); La Strada (Federico Fellini 1952), and L’Avventura (Michelangelo Antonioni 1960). Chapter 5 illustrates then the film corpus: the criteria for the collection of filmic materials, the selected source of data, the procedure for data collection, as well as the process of data transcription and extraction; the films under scrutiny will be illustrated in full details. Chapter 6 presents a descriptive and mainly qualitative analyses of the four films, and corresponding different versions, focusing on three main ‘dimensions’: technical (layout and spatial constraints), linguistic (punctuation marks and other conventions), and translation dimensions (the analysis of cultural elements). The decision to focus on these aspects precisely stems from the study carried out in the first section of the work, and specifically:  the changing practices and conventions which have affected film subtitling from the silent cinema era to modern times (Chapter 3);  the context in which these titles have been conceived and produced, determining their strict bound with the geographical, ethnographic, and socio-political national context (see Chapter 4);  the context in which these titles have been distributed and consumed, 13 determining and influencing British viewer’s habits and expectations (see Chapter 5). Chapter 7 will finally provide with general and preliminary conclusions stemming from the studies carried out in the two main sections of the present work, also proposing further possibilities to expand the proposed research. Finally, after having listed the bibliographical and filmic references, the thesis concludes with the appendices, which contain the transcription of the film corpus: appendix I includes the transcription of the dialogues of the four films; and appendix II comprises the transcription of the subtitles from the 16 mm and 35 mm film prints, the VHS tapes, and the DVDs.