This paper focuses on linguistic and cultural representation in AVT as a medium of intercultural literacy. It has two goals: it puts to the test increasingly accepted suppositions about AVT modalities’ distinctive meaning potential and expressive capacity, with a case study of communicative practices in their representation, via AVT, in subtitles across Romance and Germanic languages. The second goal is to consider, concurrently, the respective potential for representation of different types of languages, Indo-European in the first instance, in different pair configurations.