This article aims to analyze the treatment of oral marks in dubbing and subtitling of the film-symbol of French Nouvelle vague, Jean-Luc Godard’s À bout de souffle. This subject is of a fundamental importance, because one of the more complex aspects of audiovisual translation is to find acceptable equivalency for exclamations, interjections and onomatopoeia. These elements are often considered as untranslatable because of their solid bond with the language and culture of belonging or as unnecessary
to the overall understanding and decoding of the film dialogues. After an introduction about the reception of Godard’s film in Italy, on censorship of many scenes and expressions judged as vulgar and inappropriate to Italian ethics, we’ll speak about theories and problems of audiovisual translation and we’ll list the different ways of translating oral marks in a film. In the second part, we’ll analyze the treatment of interjections and onomatopoeia in the film (from original to dubbed / subtitled version).
Lastly, we’ll examine the translation of dirty words and we’ll conclude pointing out how censorship and linguistic attenuation cause the change of the image of the hero, who, in the Italian version, has a different connotation than the original one.
