Subtitling a televised trial: Depp vs. Heard

The main purpose of this dissertation was to propose an Italian subtitled version of the Depp vs Heard defamation case, in which the actor Johnny Depp sued his former wife, Amber Heard, over her opinion piece published on The Washington Post in 2018. The translation project concerned three videos taken from the trial in question, for which there were no existing Italian translations, i.e. the first half of the opening statements of both the plaintiff and the defendant, and then the whole witness examination of a former TMZ employee, who was called to testify by the plaintiff. The main software used for the project was Aegisub, a subtitle editor which allows for a great degree of customization of the subtitles. In general, the subtitling project highlighted how varied the language used during a trial can be. Indeed, in this type of setting, legal terminology shares the stage with colloquialisms and everyday use of language while still adhering to the so-called “courtroom etiquette”. Another key element addressed in both the project and the dissertation was the presence of certain elements in the opening statements which can typically be found in oral speech (e.g., false starts and stuttering), and how these were dealt with in the written text, i.e. the subtitles.