Keywords

• This paper aims at presenting how some cultural elements of the language have been translated in film dubbing and subtitling. Examples are taken from some English films that have been both subtitled and dubbed into Italian and a comparative analysis of the language utterances linked to culture in these films has been carried out. The paper starts with the analysis of some of the titles of the chosen films that have been completely changed in Italian for the lack of the correspondent form with the consequent total loss of the original meaning. It goes on presenting an analysis of the difficulties of translating some cultural elements of three linguistic categories (food-locations-institutions) common to the chosen films. The problem of how to reproduce different accents indicating regional characterization and different social class in film dubbing has also been briefly discussed. The paper has led to the conclusion that in the process of film translation and in particular in the Italian film dubbing there is a tendency to make the language as neutral as possible at a diatopic level
• so that any potential regional or social characterization of the variety spoken tends to be avoided. Besides
• as both the dubbing and subtitling processes are target-oriented
• most of the references related to the source language and source culture are often changed or omitted causing the loss of the original meaning in the target language