Cultural And Political Problems In Subtitling "Havar", "Autumn" And "Bahoz"

This article aims at discussing cultural and political problems in subtitling Turkish films, such as “Havar”, Autumn” and “Bahoz” for the European Film Festival in Italy. As it is known that translators should be careful about the political discourse which can be simply marked as the discourse of politicians, i.e. their text and talk, and their professional activities, prospective translators should be trained so well as to translate political discourse, too. Political Discourse (PD) relies on translation, in the sense that linguistic behaviour influences political behaviour. A wrong or inappropriate word choice in the context of politically sensitive issues can lead to great misinterpretations. Therefore, discourse analysis tries to define why a particular word, phrase or structure during the translation process has been chosen over another one. Besides, translators should be aware of socio-cultural values. A collaboration of translation studies and political discourse analysis is essential. Thus in the process of the training, the university students in the Department of Foreign Languages and Literatures at the University of Salento were asked to translate the subtitles of the above mentioned films into Italian language. Then their translations were corrected. Their translation was analyzed in terms of cultural and political problems in subtitling. The results show us that Italian student translators have had problems in translating some cultural and political subtitles. Therefore, it has been suggested that prospective translators’ cultural awareness should be raised to minimize translation problems.