The surtitle of the sung word: a form of linguistic and cultural mediation.

Studies dedicated to the translation of dramatic-musical texts (opera libretto, oratorio text, liederistic text) in recent decades are being (re)considered by some amateur scholars (Vega Cernuda, 2012). This modality of audiovisual translation, an heir to the film subtitling techniques and media, is closely linked to the great development of the media and the new technologies that were put at the service to “update” this kind of text; a way to reach a wider audience what was previously reserved for a select audience. In this context, we intend to trace and analyze the main uses of this translation modality and detect the difficulties presented by the elaboration of surtitles in opera (Burton, 2009). In order to achieve these research purposes, we trace a brief journey about the origin and promulgation of both interlinguistic and intralinguistic surtitle of opera librettos (Mateo, 2002; Díaz Cintas, 2007), we outline the substantial differences between subtitling and surtitle, we analyze what the main uses of this translation modality are, and we pinpoint the difficulties presented by the elaboration of surtitle in opera (Burton, 2009). By adopting a didactic approach, the different translation strategies are examined depending on the objective pursued by the surtitler (Gambier 2004, Virkkunen 2004, Desblache 2007).