I'm italian, and I was commissioned a video composed by several interviews to old people living among some hills. The final product now is a 70 minutes long video composed by interviews that are mostly spoken in italian language.
Seldom, though, these elders switch language, and start speaking in the local dialect. That happens quite often for a few words; sometimes, albeit rarely, they speak entire phrases in their dialect.
At the beginning this didn't seem like an issue because that's a pretty common thing here, and more or less everybody in this region would understand those words, so we didn't ask the elders to just repeat the phrase in italian during the interview. Now, though, those who commissioned the work started to worry about people not getting those words, in case the video gets some distribution outside of this region.
Consequently, I find myself in the necessity to create some proper subtitles (dialect to italian). The issue is that I'm not sure about how to format them in those situations where the dialect appears only for a few words in the middle of a phrase.
Of course when the phrase is entirely in dialect it would get entirely subtitled. But what when it's just a word or two? Is there some international standard? Did you ever happen to find a precedent to this situation?
The options I'm currently thinking of are these:
- subtitling the entire phrase like it was entirely spoken in dialect;
- making a subtitle which includes only the dialect word and its translation.
Example:
Per fare il savorèt prendi delle mele, e le grattugi.
meaning:
To make jam you take apples, and you shred them.
The bold word is spoken in dialect, not in italian.
Subtitles' option 1:
Per fare la marmellata prendi le mele, e le grattugi.
Subtitles' option 2:
Savorèt = marmellata.
While the first option is certainly clearer, it also sounds excessive and I fear it wouldn't fit well in the overall aesthetic of the video. Putting an entire phrase, written in the exactly same way it is spoken except for one word, in front of the spectator, thus implying it has to read it, seems almost offensive.
The second option sounds more interesting. The subtitle might appear by fading, so that it doesn't come in too abruptly. At the same time I fear that they'd require the viewer to give even more attention to the phrase being spoken, to recognize the weird words and fitting the translated word in their place. That might be confusing to some.
