"Un poquito de por favor” (“A little bit of please”): the challenge of orality to subtitling constraints

Abstract

In the following paper we present subtitling as a didactic tool employed in the multimedial translation course between Spanish and Italian of the Postgraduate Degree in Specialised Translation held at the University of Bologna. During the course, students are asked to choose, analyse and subtitle some chapters of famous Spanish tv series, such as Aquí no hay quien viva, Aída, Con el culo al aire and La que se avecina. We know that subtitling is one of the most difficult audiovisual translation practice, since it takes place in a polysemiotic and multicode context. Moreover, among all the constraints related to this practice, in our case the processes of condensation and diamesic transformation focus especially on the possibility of preserving some of those colourful orality features depicting the idiolects of the main characters.