Doctor or Dottore? How well do honorifics travel outside of Italy?

This paper illustrates the results of a corpus-driven analysis on the translation of realia in subtitles from Italian into Dutch. In Translation Studies, realia are generally defined as words and expressions with culture-specific meaning. In the present paper, we focus on a particular type of realia, namely honorifics. The analysis of realia is part of a broader research project on the circulation and reception of Italian films in Flanders (Belgium) (Caniato forthcoming). This research employs a bilingual parallel corpus, duly aligned and annotated, and draws on six films (70,910 Italian words; 58,987 Dutch words). The realia were categorised according to the translation strategy used in the subtitles (direct translation, generalisation, omission, retention, specification, substitution, official equivalent; Pedersen 2011). Our particular focus was on the subtitles of Malena (Tornatore 2000). This film is set in Fascist Italy and employs the Italian custom of honorifics with a view to, inter alia, creating humour, adding a regional flavour to the language, describing the characters' relationship with power, etc. However, these cultural aspects, condensed in the realia of the dialogue list, are barely reflected in the Dutch subtitles. The analysis of the subtitles in Malena exemplifies how subtitling, as a cultural process, involves a renegotiation of meanings. In this paper we argue that this cultural process influences the choice and frequency of the translation strategies in use in the film, favouring denotative rather than connotative meanings