Habemus papam (2011) by Nanni Moretti, a well-known auteur film, is a multilingual movie that allows an analysis of different linguistic subcodes: from religious to psychoanalytic language, from medical to theatrical discourse, from the lexicon of card games to the language of sport. Specifically, the essay examines the Italian original dialogues and then focuses on the results of the study carried out on the Spanish and German interlingual subtitles (reversed subtitling) in three selected scenes in which special languages (in particular psychoanalytic, medical and card game discourse) play a key role in characters’ description. The research highlights some difficulties encountered by audiovisual translators who resorted to differing solutions both in the subtitles and in significant passages of dubbing in the two target languages. The study aims at identifying the translation trends of language variation, in particular as far as diaphasic variation is concerned
