Archival Pathways in Film Translation History: from Chaplin to Kubrick – Guest lecture by Serenella Zanotti

You are warmly invited to a guest lecture by Serenella Zanotti on the history of film translation and archival research. The lecture will be followed by a panel discussion exploring the study of translation through archival materials. The event will be held in English.

13.00–13.15 Opening: Welcome words by Sakari Katajamäki (the Finnish Literature Society & the Traces of Translation in the Archives project)

13.15–14.45 Guest lecture by Serenella Zanotti

Serenella Zanotti is Associate Professor of English and Translation Studies at Roma Tre University. Her research has focused on topics including audiovisual and literary translation and translation archives, and she has held fellowships at the Lilly Library (Indiana University) and the Harry Ransom Center (University of Texas at Austin).

Archival Pathways in Film Translation History: from Chaplin to Kubrick

The last decade has witnessed a growing interest in film translation history (Mereu Keating 2016, O’Sullivan and Cornu 2019a and 2019c, Dwyer 2019, Mingant 2019, Gambier and Jin 2022, Abend-David 2025, Zanotti 2025a and 2025b). This resurgence of attention is generating a significant expansion of historical knowledge, characterized by a deeper engagement with what Casper Tybjerg terms “the raw material of film history” (1998). As the place where the past becomes palpable and concrete, the archive has assumed a central role in current research into film translation practices of the past (O’Sullivan and Cornu 2019b).

The aim of this talk is to interrogate the affordances and limitations of the archive in film translation research. Focusing on film directors as diverse as Charlie Chaplin and Stanley Kubrick, it will reflect on the intricacies involved in researching film translation history through the prism of the archive. The talk will consist of two parts. The first one will focus on archival traces documenting the “adaptive strategies” (Adamson 2019, 32) employed by silent film translators to tailor foreign films for local audiences, enabling them to transcend their original cultural boundaries. Archival material relating to the Italian releases of Chaplin’s films in the 1920s will be examined with a view to exploring methodological questions arising in silent film translation research.

In the second part, I will consider some of the issues involved in researching translation in a film director’s archive. The Stanley Kubrick Archive offers a rich trove of primary sources for investigating film translation practices. Translation holds an important place in this archive, as Kubrick was deeply involved in all aspects of production and post-production, including the making of foreign versions (Zanotti 2021). And yet this is an aspect that has until recently remained largely in the dark. The examination of archival traces will serve as a platform to discuss the significance of translation in Kubrick’s filmmaking, while also addressing methodological questions central to historical research. It will be argued that, as an aspect that becomes prominently visible in the archive, translation provides fertile ground for interrogating the potentials and limitations of the personal archives of influential filmmakers.

14.45–15.45 Panel discussion: Why Should We Study Translation Using Archival Materials?

Discussion with Hanna Karhu (Finnish Literature Society), Outi Paloposki (University of Turku), Niina Syrjänen (University of Eastern Finland) and Serenella Zanotti (Roma Tre University)