Subtitling Mio cognato Into English: How to

D
US-China Foreign Language, ISSN 1539-8080
May 2012, Vol. 10, No. 5, 1196-1202
DAVID
PUBLISHING
Subtitling Mio cognato Into English: How to Reshape
the Identity of a Territory
Mariacristina Petillo
University of Bari, Bari, Italy

The aim of this contribution is to explore the thorny issue of dealing with dialectal and sociocultural features in the
subtitling process of audiovisual products. More specifically, the analysis will focus on Mio cognato (My
Brother-in-law), a film directed by Alessandro Piva in 2003. Since it is strongly embedded in the Apulian
context—especially in the streets of Bari, the capital city of the region—it goes without saying that the role played
by the local dialect is a prominent one. Moreover, apart from providing further clues about the characters’ identity
and personality, the use of a regional dialect also conveys comic effects that cannot be so easily transferred to the
target text. After having compared the original and the subtitled versions of the film, the author has investigated the
following issues: how to transpose colloquialisms, dialectal expressions, expletives, and such syntactic features of
Italian spoken language as right and left dislocations into written subtitles in English. As the examples will show,
the potential loss of information due to the constraining factors of subtitling and to the geographical rootedness of
Mio cognato ends up affecting the sociolectal uniqueness of the film, thus reshaping the identity of the Apulian
territory for an English audience.
Keywords: audiovisual translation, translating dialects in multimedia contexts, subtitling Mio cognato into English
Introduction
As claimed in a special issue of inTRAlinea (2009), the translation of dialects in multimedia contexts
constitutes a rich area of research, integrating linguistics, sociology, Audiovisual Studies, Translation Studies,
Cultural Studies as well as other disciplines and fields of communication. In spite of this interdisciplinary nature,
dealing with the translation issues related to the so-called “marginal voices” (Federici, 2009, p. 15)—as
regionalised languages, dialects, idiolects, sociolects, accents, and other varieties of language are often alluded
to—means to explore a neglected field of research, which still poses serious challenges to audiovisual translators.
Moreover, the very notion of dialects—which can be defined as “minority languages that are unrecognized
or only partially recognized but which maintain a considerable social pedigree, as is the case with so many Italian
and German dialects, and diatopic and diastratic variants of the vehicular languages” (Giorgio Marrano, Nadiani,
& Rundle, 2009)—arises the difficulty of establishing clear-cut boundaries with the concept of language itself.
Mariacristina Petillo, Ph.D. in translation studies, senior lecturer at the Faculty of Foreign Languages and Literatures,
University of Bari.
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Much more time would be needed to disentangle this issue, but it is at least worth highlighting that the question of
language versus dialect is a debatable one, since “Both terms are politically loaded” (Armstrong & Federici, 2006,
p. 11) and their relationship seems to be based on an unbalance of power where languages are placed in a
dominant position over dialects, thus reaffirming the principle of hierarchical superiority over other forms of
linguistic varieties.
Given these premises, the aim of this study is to explore the thorny issue of dealing with dialectal and
sociocultural features in the subtitling process of Mio cognato (My Brother-in-law) (2003) for an English
audience. This film—the second one directed by Alessandro Piva after the successful LaCapaGira (1999)—is
strongly rooted in the Apulian territory, as it depicts the rough life of drug trafficking, smuggling, and other
illegal activities in the capital city of the region.
Obviously enough, the realistic portrayal of people belonging to low social classes and involved in
criminality is not without consequences on a linguistic level, being the film partially shot in the local dialect and
entirely set in the streets of Bari. More specifically, the author will investigate how the linguistic and social
context in which the main characters live has been represented in the English subtitles, which have to cope with
the difficult task of transposing the syntactic features of spoken language, the characters’ sociolect,
colloquialisms, and coarse words into a foreign language.
Translating Colloquialisms and Dialectal Expressions
The first difficulty encountered by audiovisual translators in turning the original dialogues of Mio cognato
into English subtitles lies in the linguistic complexity of the source text, where different varieties of language are
at work in a simultaneous way: (1) the standard Italian language; (2) the local dialect; and (3) the Italian
language characterized by many dialectal expressions.
While in the source text there are continuous shifts from one linguistic level to another, the subtitled version
has to cope with some translation issues which end up altering the stylistic features of the original dialogues. On
the one hand, subtitlers have to adopt lexical and syntactic procedures of textual reduction owing to time and
space constraints; on the other hand, the sociolinguistic richness of the film cannot be reproduced in any other
language. Consequently, the English subtitles try to recover at least the meaning of what is happening on the
screen, offering a very literal translation of the dialogues to a non-Italian audience.
This means that all the lively verbal exchanges in the southern dialect need to undergo a process of reduction
and simplification into English, which leads to a brief summary or paraphrase of the original lines. The same
strategy is adopted for subtitling the dialogues of those characters who are habitually accustomed to the use of
their dialect and tend to transfer some of its lexical and syntactic features to the Italian language, when they
happen to speak it. It goes without saying that the comic quality of some scenes is bound to get lost in the subtitled
version, thus creating a sharp contrast between the visual code—which shows exaggerated and often comic facial
expressions—and the linguistic one, which conveys the basic meaning of the film. Table 1 reports some
interesting examples, showing traces of the characters’ dialectal background.
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Table 1
Examples of Reduction and Simplification in the L2 (English Language)
Original version
Subtitled version
Toni: Dai Pippo, aiuti a mamma, dai!
Toni: Pippo, help mum!
Toni: La verità, devo dire solo due parole. Non mi va di starvi a
Toni: Just a few words. I don’t wanna bore everyone.
scocciare con le chiacchiere.
Toni: Bisogna che si impara la vita pure lui, no?
Toni: He’s gotta learn about life too.
Toni: Divertitevi, strafocatevi e pregate gli anni al bambino, a me Toni: Now have fun, pig out, wish the baby, me and the whole
e a tutta la famiglia!
family well!
Toni: Ancora ti credi che con 600 euro all’anno facevi furto,
Toni: Did you think 600 Euros covered theft, accident and fire?
civile e incendio?
Toni: Vito, stai alla macchina!
Toni: Vito, stay in the car!
Toni: Sta già fatta la denuncia.
Toni: The theft is already reported.
Toni: Statti buono eh. E grazie di tutto.
Toni: Take care. Thanks for everything.
Toni: Mò ti fanno la telefonata, ti chiedono il riscatto e dentro a Toni: Now they call you and ask for a ransom and it’s all settled
una notte è finito tutto.
in one night.
Toni: E soprattutto, mò che telefona ci devo parlare io.
Toni: Let me talk when they call back.
Toni: È che a mio cognato stamattina gli hanno frecato la
Toni: They stole my brother-in-law’s car this morning.
macchina.
Toni: Ah, non lo conosci a Mariuccio? Mariuccio Testa.
Toni: You don’t know him? Mariuccio Testa.
Nicola: Se ero a te, non la prendevo tanto (dialect) alla cogliona. Nicola: I wouldn’t take it so lightly.
Nicola: Toni, Marlon Brando sta che ti vuole fare il culo.
Nicola: Toni, Marlon Brando wants your hide.
Toni: Nicola, che io tengo pure gli altri amici, tu lo sai bene.
Toni: I got other friends, you know that.
Toni: Stanno a giocare a quella parte?
Toni: Are they playing in there?
Guidatore di ambulanza: Dopo che abbiamo passato al Pronto
Ambulance driver: After the emergency room visit.
Soccorso.
Toni: Ti hanno messo tutto lo sparatrapp, eh?
Toni: They’ve given you the full works, eh?
The analysis of the subtitles shows that a neutral English, free of regional inflections, has been chosen, thus
decreasing the linguistic richness of the original dialogues. However, although it is almost impossible to
reproduce the comic effect that the grammatical mistakes have on the Italian audience, there are some attempts to
restore the liveliness of a highly colloquial context: the use of informal contractions (wanna, gotta) and some
lexical choices belonging to a familiar register (pig out, hide). In this way, translators have saved at least part of
the communicative impact of such colloquialisms for the target audience, while respecting the principle which
says that “When dealing with dialectal or regiolectal varieties, audiovisual translation needs to focus in any case
on the communicative purpose, so that often a compromise between a specific linguistic production mode and the
communicative intent needs to be found” (Valentini & Linardi, 2009).
How to Turn Dislocation Constructions Into English Subtitles
The language spoken in the original dialogues of Mio cognato can be conveniently described as a “parlato
fortemente marcato diatopicamente” (“spoken language strongly affected by diatopic variations”) (Pavesi, 2005,
p. 38) since it plays an important role in defining the characters’ socio-geographical origins. Apart from the
obvious impossibility of transposing dialects into other languages, subtitling this film for an English-speaking
audience means to deal with colloquialisms, dialectal expressions, and marked syntactic structures. But if it is
commonly agreed in Audiovisual Translation Studies that the passage from an oral code to a written one forces
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translators to drastic measures, when subtitling Piva’s film a sort of double translation seems to take place: In the
first instance, the original dialogues have been deprived of all traces of regionalisms and dialectal influences, in
order to prepare a literal translation of what is being said; in the second instance, due to the technical constraints
of subtitling, further procedures of textual reduction have condensed the final subtitles, thus removing most of
those oral markers that would be inappropriate and redundant on the screen.
A typical example of marked syntactic structures that are commonly used in verbal interactions is
represented by dislocation constructions, where the order of the clause constituents does not follow the usual and
unmarked sequence. Instead, clause constituents can be either postponed (as in the case of right dislocations), or
advanced (as happens in left dislocations), in order to modify the way in which the information is given. The
dialogues of the film are characterized by a high number of dislocations, whose primary purpose is to place the
emphasis of communication on a specific clause constituent. For example, the information that a character
intends to emphasize is thematized through a left dislocation.
Interestingly enough, most of the marked structures in Mio cognato occur especially in emotionally-tense
scenes, when the tension aroused by interpersonal conflicts or quarrels induces the character to attract his/her
interlocutor’s attention on the most relevant information through the syntactic mechanism of left dislocations. Let
us consider the following examples in Table 2.
Table 2
Examples of Left Dislocations in the L1 (Italian Language)
Original version
Subtitled version
Toni: Qualche ceffone se lo dovrà pigliare.
Toni: He’ll take some slaps.
Toni: Tu il padrino non lo potevi fare, Vito.
Vito: Toni, io la denuncia l’ho già fatta. Mentre tu pensavi alla
festa.
Toni: Vabbé Vitino, non ti preoccupare, tanto qualche altra carta
ce l’abbiamo.
Vito: Ma tu i contanti li tieni?
Toni: I couldn’t ask you to be godfather!
Vito: I already reported it while you were at the party.
Toni: Don’t worry, we’ve got other cards to play.
Vito: Do you have cash?
Anna: E i bambini da soli li dobbiamo lasciare?
Anna: And leave the kids on their own?
Guidatore di ambulanza: Professore, se c’hai da fare non ti
Ambulance driver: If you’re busy, one of my men will take your
preoccupare. Tuo cognato lo faccio accompagnare io da uno dei
brother-in-law home.
miei.
Mariuccio: Ormai la retromarcia non la puoi mettere più.
Mariuccio: You can’t shift into reverse anymore.
The subtitled version shows that the marked order in the Italian sentences has been replaced by unmarked
choices in English. As a consequence, the film dialogues differ in the distribution of theme/rheme patterns, since
the clause constituent acting as theme in the original version becomes rhematic information in the target language.
This is what happens in such sentences as “Qualche ceffone se lo dovrà pigliare”, with the left dislocation
occurring in thematic position in order to attract the interlocutors’ attention on it. But the English translation
prefers to adopt the usual unmarked sequence of “subject + verb + complement”, thus turning “some slaps” into
the rheme of the subtitled line, but with a considerable loss in terms of communicative effectiveness.
Right dislocations too are widely diffused in Mio cognato, since they are “tipiche del parlato, e in
particolare della comunicazione colloquiale” (“typical of spoken language, and especially of colloquial
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communication”) (Pavesi, 2005, p. 74). Moreover, as observed by Pavesi (2005), recent studies have redefined
the role of dislocations, “attribuendo alla dislocazione a destra una posizione anche numerica notevole,
specialmente in alcuni generi discorsivi, tra cui il parlato filmico” (“assigning to right dislocations a
significant importance, also in terms of quantity, especially in some discursive genres, among which the film
dialogues”) (p. 72). The analysis of the film dialogues has confirmed this claim, with a high number of right
dislocations (see Table 3).
Table 3
Examples of Right Dislocations in the L1
Original version
Subtitled version
Toni: Me li ricordo ancora, quei ceffoni.
Toni: I can still remember them.
Toni: E te l’avevo detto che non la dovevi fare subito la
Toni: I told you not to report it straight away!
denuncia!
Vito: Che me la vado a cercare da solo la macchina.
Vito: I’ll look for my car on my own.
Sandokan: Perché, non lo conosci il Tulipano, Professore?
Cilluzzo: È che … Nicola Bellomo, non lo doveva fare lui il
padrino?
Toni: Tu è con me che devi parlare. Stai a sentire, tu li vuoi i
soldi?
Toni: Che la tieni una cosetta da mangiare?
Mara: Toni, come li vuoi gli spaghetti questa volta?
Sandokan: Don’t you know him, Professor?
Cilluzzo: Wasn’t Nicola Bellomo supposed to be the godfather?
Toni: It’s me you gotta talk to. Do you want the money?
Toni: Got anything to eat?
Mara: How do you want your spaghetti?
It is worth observing that right dislocations have an interactional nature and, as such, are particularly used in
the interrogative form. Although the English version shows the same tendency to restore the order of the
constituents as in the case of left dislocations, nonetheless there is an attempt to achieve greater informality in the
English questions, which are characterized by a colloquial register through the omission of the auxiliary.
Translating Expletives
As can be easily inferred, swear words and vulgar expressions play a major role throughout the whole film
and need to be translated carefully, since they add an intriguing blend of realism and comedy to the
interpersonal conflicts depicted in the film and contribute to define the social context surrounding the
characters. But dealing with expletives in audiovisual products is not an easy task, if it is true that “[T]he task
of translating swear words is a real balancing act” (Hjort, 2009); on the one hand, a faithful rendering of swear
words may be perceived as rude and potentially offensive especially in written subtitles; on the other hand,
misrepresenting or omitting them may alter the perception of the film itself, thus producing a different effect on
the target audience.
As a general rule, most of the swear words in Mio cognato have been reproduced in the English version,
even though the expressive power of some of them is somehow reduced. The translation choices observed in the
English subtitles show that different approaches have been adopted. The most common strategy is a literal
translation, consisting in the substitution of a coarse expression in Italian with an equivalent one in the target
language (see Table 4).
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Table 4
Examples of Literary Translation in Dealing With Expletives
Original version
Subtitled version
Toni: Non tanto ai figli, quanto a quei cornuti che ci vogliono Toni: Not necessarily to your kids, but to assholes who wish us
male!
evil!
Toni: Managgia ai morti, managgia!
Toni: Son of a bitch!
Toni: Che cazzo stai a dire?
Toni: What the fuck did you say?
Toni: Ma io che la tengo a fare l’agenzia, lo scemo!
Toni: That’s why I have an insurance agency, asshole!
Toni: Che io oggi tengo pure i cazzi al contrario!
Toni: I’ve got enough shit in my head today.
Cilluzzo: Disgraziata, abbassa!
Cilluzzo: You wretch, turn that down!
Toni: No, una puttanata, Mariuccio.
Toni: It’s just some bullshit.
Vito: Tu ti metti nella merda e mi trascini pure a me facendo finta
Vito: You get into deep shit and you drag me into it too.
di aiutarmi.
Vito: E chi cazzo è sto Marlon Brando eh?
Vito: Who the fuck is this Marlon Brando?
Vito: Ma vaffanculo, bastardo, vai! Vaffanculo!
Vito: Fuck off! Fuck you!
In many lines, their effectiveness is kept in both languages, or even reinforced in the subtitled version due to
the visualization of expletives in a written form (as in the case of cazzo/fuck, puttanata/bullshit, merda/shit,
vaffanculo/fuck you, and so on). In other lines, the foul language has been toned down, thus mitigating the impact
of words on the audience: For example, the following expressions have been replaced by the more inoffensive
hell or rat (see Table 5).
Table 5
Examples of Mitigation in the L2
Original version
Toni: Oh, ma che cazzo di fine ha fatto Nicola?
Saddam: Visto che tu lo conosci bene quel cornuto, gli devi
portare una mia ambasciata.
Vito: Tu ti metti nella merda e mi trascini pure a me facendo finta
di aiutarmi.
Vito: Ma basta, che se non c’avevi interesse mò col cazzo che mi
aiutavi!
Vito: Ma che cazzo fai? Mi hai spaccato il naso, cazzo!
Subtitled version
Toni: Where the hell’s Nicola?
Saddam: Since you know that rat, take him a message for me.
Vito: You get into deep shit and you drag me into it too.
Vito: Like hell you’d help me if there was nothing in it for you!
Vito: What the hell are you doing? You’ve broken my nose!
Table 6
Examples of Omission in the L2
Original version
Subtitled version
Toni: Capa di cazzo! Cambia tutto allora.
Toni: This changes everything.
Vito: Toni ma che cazzo, mi vuoi dire qualche cosa?
Vito: Won’t you tell me anything?
Toni: Chi è che da stamattina sta andando avanti e indietro come
un matto con tutti i cazzi che c’ha per la testa per aiutare a suo
Toni: Who’s been running around like crazy since this morning
cognato? Per una macchina del cazzo che ti hanno frecato stai
to help you? They stole your car and you’re making a tragedy out
facendo tutte queste tragedie manco che t’avessero sparato alle
of it. For a crappy car!
gambe! Per una macchina di merda, che più di merda, di merda e
sopramerda!
Finally, in many cases, the coarse words have been completely omitted, and as a result, the foreign audience
is presented with a distorted portrayal of the characters’ way of speaking and behaving. Interestingly enough, the
omissions occur with a higher frequency when the characters are speaking the dialect of Bari, still further proving
how difficult it is to translate diatopic varieties into other languages (see Table 6).
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Conclusions
Apart from adding couleur locale, the use of the dialect plays a pivotal role in Piva’s work, marking a
metaphorical journey of initiation undertaken by Vito through the streets of Bari, where he is reluctantly forced to
discover social rules and codes of behaviour he completely ignored before. Actually, what is the most striking in
the film is the enormous gap between the two main characters of the story, a diversity which is dramatically
emphasized also through their linguistic choices, if it is true that:
[T]he use of dialect can provide specific clues to the identity and personality of a person, for example the use of a
regional dialect indicates the geographical origins of a person and may also suggest a sense of identification with the area
in which the dialect is spoken. (Hamaida, 2007, p. 1)
Here the dichotomy lies in the contrast between the standard Italian language with no regional accent spoken
by Vito (a quiet employee leading a boring life), and an Italian language marked by regionalisms and interspersed
with dialect as preferred by Toni, an arrogant insurer who is involved in criminal activities. So, the language
spoken by the two characters becomes an instrument of personal interaction more powerful than words
themselves, forging “relationships and bonds of understanding” (Hargan, 2006, p. 58) within a social group and
marking the characters’ involvement in or distance from the illegal activities of the Apulian city.
Unfortunately, subtitling a film characterized by so many regional connotations as Mio cognato means to
find a balance between translation issues and sociolinguistic features, although most of the socio-cultural
specificity of the film dialogues cannot be preserved in the English subtitles. As a consequence, the potential loss
of information due to the constraining factors of subtitling and to the geographical rootedness of Mio cognato
ends up affecting the sociolectal uniqueness of the film, thus misrepresenting the characters’ identity to a foreign
audience. Ultimately, the choice of a neutral and standard English in the subtitled version, where all examples of
sociolinguistic variation have been reduced and almost deleted, gives further confirmation that “Lexis,
terminology, and expressions specific to regional and social varieties need to be generalised in order to guarantee
comprehension over wide geographical and social divides” (Taylor, 2006, p. 39).
References
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Federici, F. M. (Ed.). (2009). Translating regionalised voices in audiovisuals. Roma: Aracne.
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