This paper analyses the Portuguese subtitling of different British English varieties as found in a descriptive study of two film adaptations of George Bernard Shaw’s Pygmalion (1916). Several preliminary questions arose with respect to the object and aims of this study, all of them analyzable in terms of centrality and marginality. First there was the question of the position of audiovisual texts within Translation Studies; second, the question of defining subtitling, both in its relation to other ways of translating audiovisual texts and in its relation to orality and writing; and finally, the issue of defining different linguistic varieties especially in regard to the way they are organized, in terms of a centre and edges, by the attitudes of native speakers. Since all these questions are significant for the description of subtitling, the author comments on them briefly before seeing how they apply to the particular case study.