1,720,986 research outputs found
‘Did You Really Say That?’ Voiceover and the (Re)creation of Reality in Berlusconi’s ‘Shocking’ Interview for Newsnight
No full textIn one of his last appearances as presenter of Newsnight (BBC 20 May 2014), veteran journalist Jeremy Paxman interviewed Silvio Berlusconi. Three minutes into the voiced-over interpreter-mediated dialogue, the journalist known as "Newsnight’s Rottweiler-in-chief" asked: "Is it true you called [Angela Merkel] an unfuckable lardarse?" Momentarily flustered, Berlusconi toyed with the earpiece from which he listened to the interpreter translate. Recomposing himself he replied: "Non ho mai, in venti anni di politica, insultato nessuno", [I have never, in twenty years of politics, insulted anyone]. While the veracity of Berlusconi’s response is debateable, the issues at stake in this contribution are others. Combining approaches from ethnomethodology with critical discourse analysis (CDA), the article examines three aspects of the communicative event. The first focuses on its technical and linguistic construction, and the (instrumental?) choice of voice-over actor. The second aspect asks what pprompted the BBC’s decision to air the offending language, albeit through translation. Jeremy Paxman’s views on the role of interpreting and voiceover in the construction of the interview were sought, providing insight on the social actor’s perspective. The third aspect relates to the discursive construction of the event and outlines the intertextual chains (Fairclough 1995) it generated. A small dataset of British newspaper articles on the interview is analysed. Finally, the contribution offers some closing remarks
Italy’s Politicians in the News. Journalistic translation and cultural representation
No full textThis volume explores some of the underlying mechanisms that influence the ways in which news producers shape knowledge on cultural difference. Viewing translation within a broader framework of intercultural communication, the qualitative study examines the construction of translation-mediated news, focussing on two Italian political figures: Silvio Berlusconi and Matteo Salvini. Newspapers still play a crucial role in mediating between politicians and the public. Yet, the words of foreign leaders are invisibly filtered, reformulated and recontextualised in the translational act. Adopting multimodal critical discourse analysis methods, the study unpacks the meaning-making processes involved in representing the foreign, offering fresh perspectives on journalistic translation
Mediating Migrants: trust and Identity in Communicating the Migrant Crisis on the South East Coast of Sicily
Get PDFThis contribution discusses the preliminary findings of a small-scale survey on the linguistic response to the arrivals in Sicily of migrants who cross the Mediterranean Sea. The study relates to a broader project on crisis translation in migration settings and with my postdoctoral fellowship at Catania University’s School of Modern Languages, Ragusa (Italy). It aims to investigate how intercultural mediators, NGO operators working around ports and reception centres in Eastern Sicily, and the "end-users" themselves, the migrants, portray their experience of negotiating linguistic and cultural barriers within the context of the ongoing migratory phenomenon. This paper focuses on issues of trust within these interpreting triads, and on the perceptions and practices of intercultural mediation as facilitator of cross-cultural communication. Data was collected in the form of semi-structured interviews conducted in-situ. A strict process of ethical approval was adhered to in order to protect those interviewees who could be considered vulnerable respondents. Following applications to the relevant Sicilian authorities and having been granted permission to proceed, the research was carried out in two port areas and in two different types of reception centre. The first, CARA di Mineo (ordinary reception centre), was the largest reception centre for asylum seekers in Europe until early 2019 when it was closed and was under the jurisdiction of the Prefecture of Catania. The second, a CAS, (so-called emergency reception centres created in 2014 and run by regional cooperatives), is under the jurisdiction of the Prefecture of Ragusa. The study is divided into two parts: the first contextualises the data in the Italian socio-political scenario and presents the methodological and theoretical framework for the research. The second part analyses the data extracted from the interviews and closes with some tentative observations and final remarks
Salvini, stereotypes and cultural translation: analysing anglophone news discourse on Italy’s ‘little Mussolini’
No full textThis paper investigates the semiotic affordances of the visual and linguistic modes employed by Anglophone news brands to create news on the controversial Italian politician, Matteo Salvini. Grounded in multimodal critical discourse perspectives, the study has two aims: to unpack the multimodal representations of Salvini as synecdoche of Italianness and to identify the role of cultural translation in the
discursive construction of the Italian leader. The contribution posits that, although the ideological positioning of some news producers might coincide with that of Salvini, the temptation to slip into familiar tropes of Italianness will override any political alignment
“Linguistic representations of homosexual identity in Bohemian Rhapsody and Rocketman across English and Italian lingua-cultures”
No full textBased on the life of Freddie Mercury, Bohemian Rhapsody (Singer and Fletcher 2018) is a popular cinematic product that received little critical acclaim on its release; however, it became the biggest grossing music biopic of all time. Rocketman (Fletcher 2019), an impressionistic portrayal of Elton John’s rise to fame was released in its wake. Both are among the most widely debated films to emerge in recent years. Paradigmatic of the modern biopic, they recount the lives of iconic rock stars who struggle with fame, identity, and most crucially, their sexuality in seventies and eighties Britain. From a cross-cultural perspective, conveying the narratives of a more or less explicit homosexuality set in a specific spatio-temporal context to a mainstream international audience presents complex translational implications. Focusing on Anglo/Italian contexts, Ranzato (2012: 382) has argued, “the language of homosexuals has long remained in Italy the language of a ghetto and even today the relatively poor lexicon available is an objective obstacle even for the most unprejudiced translator”. This study, therefore, aims to investigate the ways in which the linguistic representations of homosexuality have been negotiated across time and space comparing the source language and dubbed versions of Bohemian Rhapsody and Rocketman to ascertain whether those obstacles have been overcome and if so, how
"Reading the news: A pilot study on Italian students’ understanding of English journalistic texts"
No full textAbstract – English newspaper headlines use non-standard morpho-syntactical and lexical
features rendering meaning opaque or ambiguous, even for native speakers (Montcomble
2018). Steeped in culturemes and ideological stances, news discourse is constructed in
specific socio-cultural contexts and therefore needs considerable cognitive effort and linguacultural competence for the non-native speaker to fully understand. Using online
newspapers in the L2 classroom is thus a double-edged sword: on the one hand, students are
exposed to authentic, situated language that reports on current affairs and socio-cultural
issues, thus enriching their learning experience; on the other, the teacher has the onerous
task of unravelling the obscurities intrinsic to the language of newspapers. This contribution
reports on action research carried out in an L2 classroom of a post-graduate International
Studies programme at the University of Pisa. The classroom practice aimed to encourage
students to critically engage with news texts, focusing on three learning objectives: 1. to
unpack and infer meanings from news headlines; 2. to apply a critical discourse analysis
tool kit (Machin and Mayr 2012) to the construal of news discourse; 3. to reflect critically
on and discuss the content of selected news articles presented in class. The dataset includes
transcriptions of extracts from the classes streamed and recorded on Microsoft TEAMS, and
survey feedback from the students who participated on the successes and failures of the
classroom practice
Mediating migration crises: Sicily and the languages of despair
Get PDFConnected with a broader project on crisis translation, this article presents the results of a small-scale survey of the linguistic response to the arrivals in Sicily of migrants who cross the Mediterranean Sea. The contribution focuses on how intercultural mediators, NGO operators working around ports and reception centres in Eastern Sicily, as well as migrants portray their experience of the Italian institutions' language policies supporting interlingual communication. Firstly, we provide a succinct overview of the Italian legal frameworks regulating language mediation and cultural support to migrants in the early phases of reception. Secondly, we discuss data collected through open-ended questions and observations, conducted in-situ by means of recorded interviews with a range of social actors involved in the linguistic and cultural mediations (including five interviews with intercultural mediators; five with migrants; and five with NGOs personnel and psychologists providing support in the various stages of the reception of migrants). By adopting ethnographic methods, the interview data are analysed here qualitatively and thematically to identify shared concerns and contrasting views on the ways in which immigration laws and policies regulating language mediation are interpreted by practitioners and migrants. Finally, the article reflects on these interpretations against the applicability of the legal framework as perceived by those who implement the policies and guidelines to accommodate language needs of migrants.
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Cette contribution, connectée avec un projet plus ample sur la traduction de crises, présente les résultats d’une enquête sur la réponse linguistique aux débarquements des migrants qui traversent la Méditerranée arrivant en Sicile. Cet article se concerne de la manière dont les migrants, les médiateurs interculturels et les personnels de ONG, qui travaillent dans les ports et les centres d’accueil en Sicile orientale, dépeignent leurs expériences de l’application des politiques linguistiques italiennes qui soutiennent la communication interlinguale.
D’abord, on offre un panoramique sur les cadres légaux italiens réglementant la médiation linguistique et le soutien culturel aux migrants dans les premières phases d’accueil. Depuis, on discute les données à partir de questions ouvertes et d’observations collectées pendant des entretiens enregistrés avec des divers acteurs sociaux impliqués dans les médiations linguistiques et culturelles (5 entretiens avec des médiateurs interculturels, 5 avec des migrants et 5 avec personnels de ONG et psychologues soutenant la première phase de l’accueil des migrants).
En adoptant des méthodes ethnographiques, les données des entretiens sont analysées qualitativement et thématiquement pour identifier les préoccupations partagées et les points de vue opposés sur la façon dont les politiques d’immigration italiennes, qui gèrent la médiation linguistique, sont interprétées par les praticiens et les migrants. Enfin, l’article termine en réfléchissant sur ces interprétations par rapport à leur applicabilité autant qu’elle est perçue par ceux qui doivent appliquer ces lignes directrices de la politique linguistique pour soutenir les exigences linguistiques des migrants
Representations of the Ideal Workplace in Multimodal Texts: Employer Branding on the Career Pages of Corporate Websites
No full textCorporate websites are sophisticated tools targeting multiple addressees through different channels. Among the addressees, prospective and current employees are key to the success of companies: employer branding is thus crucial to the conveying of a positive image of the company as an employer.
This study analyses how multimodal texts available on the Careers section of corporate websites use presentation and involvement strategies to attract and inform the viewers and to communicate corporate values. The research was carried out on the Employer Branding Multimodal Corpus, which comprises both texts in which the companies describe themselves and state their values, and employee testimonials.
The broad framework for the analysis of websites devised by Pauwels (2012) was applied and a corpus-assisted discourse studies approach (Partington et al. 2013) was used to analyse the corpus. The study also considered the visual component of the webpages, focusing on the ideational function realized by the images (Kress & van Leeuwen, 2006).
Results shed light on the involvement devices used by the companies on their websites, and reveal that values such as positive interpersonal relationships, learning opportunities, creativity, innovation and inclusiveness are emphasised both through linguistic and visual elements
Translating Racial Slurs: A Comparative Analysis of Gran Torino Assessing Transfer of Offensive Language between English and Italian.
Get PDFThis dissertation focuses on the role played by translations in constructing a cultural product. It chooses the American film 'Gran Torino' (2008) as its source text and discusses the ideological and cultural implications of rendering racial slurs from English into Italian. The dissertation therefore sets the analysis against a backdrop of contemporary North American and European culture understood in linguistic and behavioural patterns and questions the role of audiovisual translational norms in the source culture and tasks of translators in general when dealing with such highly sensitive, culture-bound issues pertaining to the meaning transfer of lingua-cultural taboos. The comparative analysis of the audiovisual texts takes a Critical Discourse perspective, with a strong ideological focus on the possible translation effects
What Mediators Want: a qualitative needs analysis on the training and formation of future intercultural mediators
No full textThis article presents the results of a sample survey on the training of intercultural mediators working in rescue, primary, and second phases of migrant reception in the Sicilian province of Ragusa. Adopting ethnomethodological and phenomenological approaches (Moustakas 1994 Creswell 2013: 81), the survey focuses on the intercultural mediators’ (henceforth ICMs) perception of the qualifications, experience, and skills they believe are necessary to carry out their work efficiently. A sample of 10 ICMs with different experiential and educational backgrounds responded to open ended questionnaires shedding light on the ways in which they experienced the shared phenomenon of mediating in contexts of emergency arrivals in Italy and their preparedness for such work. Informants included graduates in “Scienze per la mediazione interculturale” from the University of Catania’s School of Modern Languages in Ragusa and ICMs who had attended a vocational course at the Il Centro Mediterraneo di Studi e Formazione Giorgio La Pira in Pozzallo. To gain further insights, in-depth semi-structured interviews were then carried out with six of the ICMs who had responded to the questionnaires, and with the course directors at the above-mentioned institutions. The study aims to contribute to the ongoing debate on the status of the intercultural mediator in Italy, both legally and ontologically. Most crucially, however, the research attempts to understand what intercultural mediators feel they need in terms of training and education, particularly for those who work in the field of the reception and integration of migrants coming from the African continent
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