Subtitle Project

Beltrame, Margherita (2004)
Università di Bologna, SSLiMIT Forlì

Questa tesi è stata effettuata nell’ambito del progetto di ricerca Subtitleproject.
This thesis was carried out under the auspices of the Subtitleproject.

Abstract:

In January 2004 Cineteca del Comune di Bologna contacted our faculty, requesting translators to work as subtitlers on the 4th edition of the film festival “Human Rights Nights”. From February till March 2004, a team of six students worked (under Professor Chris Rundle’s supervision) with staff at the Cineteca. This dissertation presents and explores this experience and compares it with the data collected during the “Subtitle Project”, a research project headed by Prof. Rundle, which commenced in June 2003. It also includes an examination of the subtitles for one of the works presented at “Human Rights Nights 2004”, a documentary by Cambodian director Rithy Panh entitled S21 – La Machine de Mort Khmère Rouge. Our analysis of the subtitles focuses on how the translation strategies adopted vary on the basis of genre, target audience and context, and demonstrates how these particular conditions play a fundamental role in the subtitling process. This analysis includes a comparison between the documentary S21 – La Machine de Mort Khmère Rouge and the film The Killing Fields (Roland Joffé, 1984), two works with a similar subject matter but of a different genre. The comparison between two works with same topic but of a different genre shows how different genres face the subtitler with different problems and priorities and therefore require different subtitles. This dissertation is divided into four chapters. In the first chapter our experience as a subtitler for “Human Rights Nights 2004” is presented and compared with the information and data on Italy’s subtitling industry which was collected during the “Subtitle Project”. Chapter II outlines the history of Cambodia, from I century to nowadays, focusing in particular on the period covered by the documentary that we subtitled, i.e. the Pol Pot regime. Chapter III deals with the two genres of documentary and film. In this chapter we analyse the technical features of the two genres and also present a detailed analysis of S21 – La Machine de Mort Khmère Rouge and The Killing Fields. This chapter highlights that a knowledge of the genre can greatly assist a translator/subtitler in setting priorities in the subtitling. Chapter IV offers examples taken from the subtitles that we made for S21 – La Machine de Mort Khmère Rouge, and comments on the solutions adopted due to genre (documentary), the target audience (a public interested in history and human rights issues), and the context in which the documentary was going to be screened (the “Human Rights Nights” film festival in Bologna). In practical terms, that meant favouring long subtitles in order to convey all the details and information and to respect the message of the documentary. As subtitling S21 – La Machine de Mort Khmere Rouge meant translating not from dialogue but from English subtitles, the issue of pivot subtitling is also addressed in this dissertation, and examples are given of when the presence of pivot titles helped the subtitler. The Appendix contains the program of “Human Rights Nights 2004”, the interviews with Francesco Filipperi and Anne Zimmerman, who work respectively for the subtitling agencies Classic Titles and Digititles in Florence, and the complete transcription of the English and Italian subtitles of S21 – La Machine de Mort Khmere Rouge.