Subtitling Italian politics and culture in Paolo Sorrentino’s Il divo

Paolo Sorrentino’s film Il divo. La Spettacolare vita di Giulio Andreotti (2008) is based on the political career of Giulio Andreotti, the most prominent and controversial figure in modern Italian political history. To some extent, Andreotti’s sharply ironic and enigmatic persona reflects the contradictions of Italian society, thus corroborating existing stereotypes. It is therefore not surprising that this movie has fomented a great deal of scholarly debate over the issue of political corruption, which seems inherently part of Italian culture (Antonello 2010, Marcus 2010a and 20120b, Marlow-Mann, 2010). More importantly, the film has become the focus of the debate regarding the ways recent audiovisual works by the new wave of young Italian directors have dealt with such a phenomenon (Holdaway, 2011). The linguistic and cultural peculiarities of Il divo have cast doubt on the likelihood of its success outside its country of origin, which Sorrentino believed could be offset by his innovative cinematic approach to Italy’s so-called cinema of ‘civic engagement’ (or cinema d’impegno) (Crowdus and Sorrentino, 2009). Hence, this study concentrates on the comparative analysis of Il divo (Source Text, ST) and its English subtitled version (Target Text, TT). In particular, it considers the challenges that this film poses to its transfer. The examination of the two datasets shows that the translator has retained the language- and culture-specific references to Italian politics and related events in most parts of the text. However, this may require a substantial processing effort on the part of the target viewer and might be detrimental to the appreciation of the film itself.