The work of a dialogue adapter is not just that of translating and interpreting a script and a movie, it also entails a creative process. Dialogue adapters translates and adapts not only the dialogues, jokes and puns through the audiovisual product, but they also have to come up with at least 3 ideas for the main title. Despite this, it is the distributor who will chose and approve the main title, based on the type of product, the target audience, marketing evaluations and, at times, economic factors.
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We have to admit that, at times, the final choice is, to say the least, odd. Let’s take, for example, one of the most prominent case of questionable title choice: “The eternal sunshine of the spotless mind”, a movie released in 2004 featuring Kate Winslet and Jim Carrey. The original title, a reference to the poem “Eloisa to Abelard” by Alexander Pope, is completely adapted in Italian; in Italy, the movie was released with the title “Se mi lasci ti cancello” (which literally means “If you leave me, I’ll erase you”), a choice that is odd at best but probably comes in the wake of successful movies like “Runaway Bride”, whose title in Italian was translated with a similar grammatical structure, “Se scappi ti sposo” (literally “If you run away, I’ll marry you”).
In the same fashion, you could question the title adaptation of the 2009 rom-com movie “500 days of summer”, starring Joseph Gordon-Levitt and Zooey Deschanel. The original title is a play-on-words between the name of the female protagonist, Summer, and the duration of her relationship with Gordon-Levitt’s character. Unfortunately, for the Italian audience the play-on-words had to be substituted with a plain “500 giorni insieme” (literally, “500 days together”) due to the impossibility of keeping the wordplay because the name Summer, on which the play-on-words is built on, when translated, it is not a name Italian people use for a person therefore requiring the adapter to find a solution that would work, even at the expense of the original wordplay.
It’s important to notice that not only rom-com movies are liable to title changes: when “Dr. No”, the first James Bond movie, was released in 1962, the Italian audience got to know it with the title “Licenza di uccidere” (literally “Licence to kill”). There would have been no problem if not for the 1989 James Bond movie “Licence to kill”; at that point, the Italian adapters had to work creatively and came up with the new title “Vendetta privata” (literally, “Private justice”).
As we’ve seen title adaptations can be tricky, but sometimes creativity is a bless and the Italian adaptation perfectly fits the bill: it’s the case of “Dead poets society”, a superlative 1989 movie starring the late Robin Williams. In this particular case, the mere translation of the original title would have not conveyed the same sense that the original does but it would have probably convinced the Italian audience that the movie was a horror movie instead of a dramatic one. So, the adapters chose to extrapolate a movie quote and rephrase it for the title “L’attimo fuggente” (“The fleeting moment”) which is a reference to the Latin quote “Carpe diem” used by Robin Williams in one of the most famous scenes of the movie.