The effectiveness of English subtitles in a Culturally important Italian film - Essay Example

Italian thinking facilitated certain closeness inside their country. "Like most family-concentrated societies, Italy is a relational culture. This stems from a history in which trust did not extend much beyond the front door or, at most, the city-state. There is an order of precedence: family first, then neighbourhood, then town, region and, finally, country," (http://www.expatica.com/source/site_article.aspsubchannel_id=159&story_id=11484&name=Italy Today, Italy is a part of European Union, and in the new globalised world, she cannot be called a great player.

As one of the Nation States of EU, she hobnobs with other Member States, and the close proximity of other cultures touches her in many ways. Italy's flourishing tourism, has become a national industry today and the country is reaping the harvest of her great art centres. Most of her guests are from English speaking countries and now with the world accepting English as the common language, Italian Government has made unprecedented efforts to include English as one of the languages in the curriculum in schools.

"Through the foreign language we renew our love-hate intimacy with our mother tongue. We tear at her syntactic joints and semantic flesh and resent her for not providing all the words we need. In translation, the everyday frustrations of writing assume an explicit, externally projected form. If we are impotent, it is because Mother is inadequate. In the process of translation from one language to another, the scene of linguistic castration-which is nothing other than a scene of impossible but unavoidable translation and normally takes place out of sight, behind the conscious stage-is played on center stage.

(Johnson, 1985, pp. 143-4), http://www.arts.usyd.edu.au/departs/perform/docs/AP1Bollen.pdf On that very drive, some of the Italian cinema is given English subtitles, facilitating tourists to understand the Italian cinema and Italian culture. These movies are used as tools to teach English to students. This is a clever idea, as Italian children, while watching the movies, can have the facility of reading the English translation, and the relative meanings would be understood readily. The Italian movie, Caterina Va in Citta (Caterina in a big city), directed by Paola Virzi, a fast-paced comedy, culturally rich, has got English subtitles along with other movies like Marco Ponti, Le fate ignoranti, Pinocchio, La finestra di fronte, and many more.

English subtitles, to some extent are an indication of Italy's accepting English as a common language between Member States of European Union. There is a need for large number of English teachers in Italy. "The answer is that to gather sufficient "manpower" the Ministry of Education decided to run 500-hour training courses also for those teachers who had no experience at all of English but wanted to have a try," http://www.onestopenglish.com/Magazine/teacher_letters/teaching_english_italy.htmPeople are aware of English now, due to satellite TV programmes, Internet and English magazines.

In a globalised, European Unionised Italy, Italians have realised that English has gained importance as a passport to work abroad and today, Italians, with their saucy attractiveness, are anything but homebound. While being