Short films, coarse speech and subtitling: The case of Diez minutos (2004) and Dime que yo (2008)

Abstract

The essay analyses a corpus of two contemporary Spanish-language auteur short films: Diez minutos by Alberto Ruiz Rojo, released in Spain in 2004, and Dime que yo by Mateo Gil, shown four years later. Both belonging to a dramatic genre with some romantic nuances, the two filmic texts show - despite the different plots - a very recognizable colloquial juvenile language that includes a massive use of vulgar expressions and coarse speech. Since we do not have an official Italian translation, but only an English subtitling, we will subtitle in Italian the sequences in which this kind of language predominates, trying to compensate some linguistic and cultural losses. The aim of this work is not to reduce or to neutralize the use of swear words and vulgar forms, neither because of the reduction in the number of characters required for the practice of interlingual subtitling, nor for mere marketing reasons.

Keywords
short films; coarse language; juvenile language; audiovisual translation; interlinguistic subtitling