Medical audiovisual translation: A study of five videos on vaccines and a proposal for subtitling them into Italian

The present thesis investigates medical audiovisual translation, specifically on the topic of vaccines, and the main challenges for subtitlers and translators. The work focuses on the analysis of the excerpts of five different YouTube videos: a TedTalk, one debate from the channel “The Jubilee”, one debate from the university association “Cambridge Union” and two interviews to vaccines experts from the channel “Conference Union”. The first two chapters outline a theoretical groundwork of Translation Studies and Audiovisual Translation (AVT), tracing their historical evolution and their relevance in modern studies. The third chapter addresses Language for Specific Purposes (LSP) – with particular attention to scientific and medical language – concluding with the investigation of the process of science popularization in modern media. The fourth chapter provides the data, methods and rationale of the project. The fifth and final chapter sheds light on all the findings of the analysis of medical LSP and popularized science discourse encountered in the subtitling process. The investigation develops across five categories: linguistics of subtitling (specifically text reduction and the phenomena of condensation and reformulation, omission, segmentation and line breaks), register, vocabulary, semiotics of subtitling and on-screen text and finally the formal and textual feature of punctuation.