Developing students’ translation competence and intercultural awareness through subtitling: a didactic proposal

The aim of this paper is to highlight the validity of subtitling as a pedagogical tool having a significant impact on the improvement of various skills, ranging from translation to the acquisition of socio-cultural knowledge and intercultural awareness. Specifically, it describes a didactic proposal based on the integration of interlingual subtitling into university general translation courses. The didactic project was carried out with a class of undergraduate language students attending a university translation module who were asked to engage in subtitling activities of a variety of films and TV series. Particular emphasis was given to multilingual films which involve specific translation problems, such as the rendering of language diversity and variation (i.e. ethnolects, dialects, sociolects, accents, language varieties, idiolects, etc.) and cultural references. Such translation tasks can enhance students’ awareness of the complexity of the translation process and of the role of the translator as a cultural mediator, not only fostering the development of strategies related to audiovisual comprehension and audiovisual translation, but also promoting students’ intercultural awareness.