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This paper draws from the experience of supervising the subtitling of short films for several international film festivals carried out by MA students in Specialised Translation between 2021 and 2022. Starting from some considerations on the effectiveness of using short films in the didactics of translation, it will establish a parallel between the operations of synthesis activated in metaphor to resolve complex conflictual meanings creatively and those involved in short films. The unifying function played by metaphorical structures will be investigated in a selection of case studies, underlining the importance of preserving cultural, cognitive, and textual cohesion in the translation. Considering the inevitable metonymic-metaphoric continuum that characterises audiovisual texts and the need to avoid intersemiotic tension between channels in the subtitling process, the discussion will revolve around examples taken from different subgenres, from documentary to poetry films, aimed to illustrate a spectrum of challenges posed by the translation of metaphors and the strategies used to resolve them while respecting the viewer's space for interpretation and, more generally, the delicate 'ecosystem' of the short film. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

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 expertise, 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. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]