Using Wahl’s definition (2005: 2) and classification of polyglot cinema (2008: 340), Andrea Segre’s Come il Peso dell’Acqua (Like the Weight of Water, 2014) can be defined as a ‘migration documentary’. Three migrant women and mothers, Gladys Yeboah Adomako from Ghana, Nasreen Tah from Syria, and Semhar Hagos from Eritrea, narrate their difficult journey from their homelands to the Italian shores. While Gladys uses English as the vehicle for self-narration, Nasreen shares her story in Arabic and Semhar in Tigrinya. The women’s personal experiences are contextualised in the broader geopolitical context by two Italian narrators, Marco Paolini and Giuseppe Battiston. In Italy, Come il Peso dell’Acqua has been distributed differently depending on the context of distribution. When broadcasted on Rai3, where it premiered in 2014, the film had the dialogues of the three migrant women translated into Italian via voice-over. On the other hand, when distributed through the Italian cinema network, voice-over was substituted with Italian subtitling.
In the US, the film premiered with English subtitles at the “Italy and the Euro-Mediterranean Migrant Crisis” event as the final stage of a joint project between University of Macerata (Italy) and Montclair State University (USA). As a consequence, Italian, English, Arabic, and Tigrinya are the main languages of the film, with English also working as a target language.
Bearing all this in mind, in the present contribution we try to offer an insight into the solutions found to translate this multilingual documentary. We shall first explore how the diversity of language has been rendered to make the film accessible to its multiple target audiences and in different contexts of distribution (i.e., Italy and the USA); then, we shall see whether the translation choices made contribute or not to altering the representation of migrant’s experience and identity, thus possibly negatively affecting audience engagement. By extending the notion of “synchresis” (Chion, 1994: 63) to film translation, we shall conclude by reflecting on the potential threat migration films pose to commercial filmmaking, not only for accentuating and celebrating linguistic diversity but also for asking for an extra effort on the part of the audience, also depending on the chosen translation modality.