The Macmillan English Dictionary (Rundell, 2002), lists the three following senses of ‘fidelity’:

(1) The attitude or behaviour of someone who is willing to have sex only with their husband, wife or partner;

(2) Loyalty to a person, organization or principle;

(3) The degree to which something is an accurate copy or translation of something else.

Fidelity – in the third sense – is not a notion that immediately springs to mind when discussing screen translation. In dubbing and subtitling, what counts more than anything else is the transfer of speech acts, not necessarily the exact elements that make up the original speech acts: ‘We should remember that the audience reaction to a funny line is far more important than any literal fidelity to the original sense’ (Whitman, 2001: 149). Still, with drama and similar genres, fidelity in translation is often considered worth striving at – provided that speech acts are successfully recreated in the process.

In comparison with feature films, whether dubbed or subtitled, documentaries stand out by typically retaining their culture-specific references in translation. Referring to the fate of Brazilian documentaries in Europe, Franco (2001: 177) observes that ‘a greater degree of exoticism or foreignization is almost inevitable in translated documentaries’.

However, the most ‘exotic’ elements in a film up for translation may not be those that establish the foreign universe in which many (Anglo-American) productions are set. In discussing the Italian translation of internationally popular Disney cartoons, Di Giovanni concludes that: difficulty in translation does not generally lie in the rendering of cultural otherness [e.g. the ‘exotic’ setting of Aladdin] but rather in adapting those American expressions, idioms and references which are designed to act as balancing elements but whose primary role is to ensure a smooth and pleasant reception by the American and English speaking viewers. (Di Giovanni, 2003: 217)

In most polysemiotic media only the verbal content may be altered in translation. The continual presence of the other semiotic channels (the image and the international music and effects track) in the translation means that on the axis ranging from strictly verbatim rendition of the original (verbal) text to free, target-culture recreation of the text, for example, so-called localization, translations of commercial film and TV productions would be expected to stay near the source-oriented pole. This source-orientation should be especially pronounced in subtitling, as no part of the original work is replaced, and subtitles are added to the original and presented in sync with the dialogue.