Subtitling The Handmaid’s Tale for an Italian Audience

This paper delves into the analysis of the adaptation of Atwood’s novel The Handmaid’s Tale for the screen. Bruce Miller’s TV adaptation of the book on Hulu in 2017 inspired a revival of interest in Atwood’s work, topping the world’s bestseller lists and winning a Golden Globe and eight Primetime Emmy Awards. In this study, aimed at investigating the quality of the Italian subtitled version of the TV show, an approach inspired by a set of taxonomies within Descriptive Translation Studies (DTS) related to domestication and foreignization (Venuti 1995), translation equivalence (Nida 1964; Toury 1995), subtitling quality (Gottlieb 2009), and good subtitling practice (Carroll and Ivarsson 1998) was employed in order to identify the main categories adopted, while Remael and Robert’s quality parameters in subtitling (2016) also contributed to the discussion of the results of our study. Based on the results of the quality assessment, it was determined that the Italian subtitled version of The Handmaid’s Tale exhibited high quality in terms of content and transfer (e.g., accuracy, completeness, logic), and style and form (e.g., grammar, spelling, and punctuation), with only a few minor errors observed in terms of formatting, some major issues related to the technical dimension (e.g., spotting), and adherence to the dubbing script, a peculiar phenomenon we have extensively described.