Sottotitolare White Teeth vent’anni dopo: asincronie socioculturali di un adattamento televisivo

While — for historical, political, and socio-economic reasons — the artistic and cultural value of dubbing has been acknowledged in Italy since the introduction of sound films in the late Twenties, subtitling has often been considered as a second-rate form of translation, wavering between experimentations devoid of any connection with actual speech and mere informativeness. The idea that captioning is a mechanical practice aimed at summarizing the contents of the dialogues, thus depriving them of their pragmatic and aesthetic complexity, is still widely accepted. In contrast with this view, from the double perspective of film studies and linguistics, the authors of the paper argue that subtitling requires, along with linguistic and technical ex- pertise, as much focus and research on the cultural specificity of the audiovisual text as dubbing and is therefore to be regarded as a knowledge-based and knowledge-producing practice. The subtitling of the television series White Teeth (Channel 4) by MA students attending the Course in Audiovisual Translation at IULM University, Milan, in 2019/20 was a testing ground that brought to the fore interconnected technical, linguistic, and cultural challenges. Interestingly, many of the issues were related to the diachronic gaps within Zadie Smith’s novel, which spans from the Indian Mutiny in mid-nineteenth century and 2000, as well as between the publication of the book in the same year and the airing of the English series in 2002, and, finally, between the appearance of the original series in Britain and the proposed translation for an Italian audience almost twenty years later. In two decades, the cultural attitude of a society can indeed have entirely changed. And yet, paradoxically, it is precisely thanks to these asynchronies that unexpected consonances have occurred in the re-localization of the series in a different cultural context.