“Dancing with Dharma” / “Ballando con Dharma”

Making Wise Choices in Audiovisual Translation in the First Students’ Symposium “Wise Choices in AVT"

Abstract

“Dancing with Dharma”: making wise choices in audiovisual translation in the first Students’ Symposium “Wise Choices in AVT”. During the First Student Symposium on Audiovisual Translation, organised by the West University of Timișoara, five universities, including the University of Turin, were asked to work on the 2022 British short film “Dancing with Dharma” (Sukanya- Devika.K. Jhala). In February 2023, the students involved were asked to produce subtitles, SDH (subtitles for the deaf and hard of hearing) and audio description (for the blind and visually impaired) in their mother tongue. The team decided to use the subtitling software Ooona Tools, the AD software ADauthor, and the Netflix guidelines. The final aim of the project was to promote the teaching of audiovisual translation in Universities and to evaluate the different results in various languages: Chinese, English, Hungarian, Italian and Romanian. After 5 months, the results were discussed at a conference held in Timișoara, Romania, on June 13th, 2023. In this paper, two of the Italian students involved in the project discuss the translation challenges encountered (the problem of textual fidelity and loss of information, and the translation of humour, wordplay and cultural references) and comment on the final result.