The practice of retranslation in subtitling

This article examines the practice of retranslation within the context of subtitling, an area that has received little attention compared to literary works. Using a corpus of English translations of the French film La Haine, it highlights the complexities of resubtitling due to technical and multimodal constraints, while evaluating how retranslations handle non-standard language and cultural references. The analysis shows that with new translations cultural references get closer to the source text, a finding that aligns with the so-called retranslation hypothesis, whereas in the translation of marked speech this parallelism is less straightforward. The results suggest that the practice of resubtitling is far from being predictable and cannot be moulded on the premises of the retranslation hypothesis.