Denise A Filmer

This article presents the results of a multimodal critical discourse analysis comparing UK and Italian online news texts published at the beginning of the COVID-19 pandemic. Our theoretical framework and methodology draw upon framing theory, journalistic translation research, multimodal discourse analysis and discursive news values analysis (DNVA). Our analysis demonstrates how coverage of the pandemic in leading UK and Italian newsbrands perpetuated Italian and British national and cultural stereotypes through lexis, choice of images and transquotation. By exploring the nexus between multimodal discourse and cultural translation in the framing of international news, our study contributes to closing the gap in multimodal news translation research.

Keywords: news translation, cultural representation, COVID-19, multimodality, news values

From diachronic and gendered perspectives, the study implements a mixed methods framework to address the following research questions: 1) has the use of formal politeness markers decreased over time? 2) Do gender dynamics influence impoliteness strategies in the context of PMQs? 3) In the shift from verbal to written discourse, what diamesic transformations appear in the official parliamentary transcriptions? The self-built corpus includes selected video recordings of PMQs from each of the Prime Ministers' mandates, and the corresponding official transcripts published online by Hansard. The audiovisual texts were viewed and examined, the speech was manually transcribed, and then compared to Hansard's version. Initial findings suggest that over time, across genders, and in Hansard's digital transcripts, the use of politeness forms in PMQ exchanges appears to be diminishing as formulaic expressions are omitted or substituted with pronouns.

This paper investigates the fluctuating attitudes and emotional responses to the adjective 'woke' viewed through the lens of British news discourse. The study seeks to understand how recent newspaper coverage surrounding the notion of woke culture and its linguistic referents has influenced the semantic and pragmatic shifts of 'woke'. The analysis is based on a self-compiled corpus of British newspaper articles featuring the contested term and is conducted both quantitatively and qualitatively. The polarisation of British newsbrands (quality vs. tabloids and left-leaning vs. right-leaning) seems to play a pivotal role in determining the way in which 'woke' is implemented within the text: either as part of journalistic discourse, as metadiscourse, or within reported discourse. The collocation analysis uncovers the discourses that most typically characterise news reporting on 'woke' highlighting different attitudes and representations. Having identified five key news narratives on wokeness, two mini case studies critically assess how multi-modal features contribute to and reinforce the meaning-making process, confirming the current polarised and ideologically loaded usage of 'woke'.

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 postgraduate 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.

This article discusses the blurring of boundaries between journalist and translator (Doorslaer 2012: 1050) in producing news discourse on Italy for the British press. Focusing on the journalists’ perspective, the article presents data retrieved from a series of qualitative interviews with correspondents for Italy who work for the major British newspapers, Reuters’ chief correspondent for Italy, and the former editor-in-chief of The Economist. The study aims to ascertain exactly who translates the extracts and quotes that are “embedded as raw material for the construction of news stories” (Orengo 2005: 173) published in the newspapers under discussion. The study also sets out to uncover some aspects of the “journalator’s” habitus, to find out how the journalists perceive translation within their work, and not least of all, to learn something of their translational practices. In order to shed light on this last point, two examples of Berlusconi’s taboo language as reported in the media were discussed with the interviewees. The article concludes with some tentative observations on the data discussed.

On August 20th, 2018, 177 refugees were refused the right to disembark at the Port of Catania following their rescue at sea by the Italian coastguard. Matteo Salvini, then Interior Minister, declined to authorise disembarkation stating that he was acting in the public interest.
He was subsequently charged by Italian prosecutors for illegal detention and abuse of office. A sad milestone in the European migration crisis, the narration of the Diciotti Crisis unfolds across languages, cultures, and media: digital intertextuality via translated quotations, tweets
and posts from Facebook are interwoven with evocative images in the construction of multimodal news texts. Through a qualitative lens, this contribution examines the representation of the
Diciotti Crisis in major UK news brands focusing on the role of translingual quotations in narrating the events. Drawing on a theoretical framework that combines journalism and media
studies, news translation, and critical discourse studies, a self-compiled dataset was constructed in order to address the following questions: In which ways are translated quotations employed in the
construction of the news and where are they sourced? In terms of news values, which aspects of the episode, with its far-reaching implications on the issues of international asylum law and human
rights, were foregrounded by the different news brands?

According to political philosopher, Thomas Nail, “The twenty-first century will be the century of the migrant” (2015, 1). In 2015 alone over one million human beings, mainly from Syria, Afghanistan and Iraq, risked their lives in unseaworthy vessels to reach the shores of Europe.1 An unparalleled humanitarian phenomenon in terms of scale - migration itself is part of the human condition (cf. Jayawardena, 1995: vii; Nyers, 2013) – the so-called “migrant crisis” has fuelled extreme xenophobic tendencies in popular political discourse throughout the European continent, reflected in equally inflammatory media coverage. Many British newspapers, for instance, have been roundly condemned by global humanitarian agencies, particularly for “the language used”2 to narrate events ensuing from the migratory flow. Italian newspapers have also come under criticism from national human rights organisations, while journalists from both countries have been sued for the lexical choices employed to denote migrants.3 A selected sample of these discursive representations produced by British and Italian news media constructed through the language of conflict are the focus of this contribution. Two mini-case studies analyse small but significant datasets around two key texts that generated meta-linguistic debate in media discourse chains (Fairclough, 1995). The study is divided into two parts. The first offers the theoretical rationale for the qualitative critical approaches adopted and explains the methods used. The second part focuses on the analysis. Considering news as narrative (Baker, 2006; Lopocaro, 2006), the contribution analyses the following discursive events that took place in 2015. The first occurred in the midst of the “Calais Crisis”, as The Sun stirred heated debate with the editorial “migrants are like cockroaches” (Hopkins 17 April 2015). The second was the consequence of the Paris bombings; the then editor of the Italian newspaper Libero (Belpietro 14 November 2015), published a front page editorial under the headline “Bastardi Islamici”, generating discussions as to the legality and ethics of such a title. The contribution concludes with some tentative indications of audience response via readers’ below the line comments to these particularly provocative news texts and a reflection on the status quo of racism in the news after nearly thirty-five years of CDA.

Based 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.

Key-words: homosexual identity, dubbing, biopics, cross-cultural
pragmatics, sociolinguistics, film studies.

This chapter discusses some of the interwoven issues concerning translation, imagology and ideology in the news. Part of a larger project investigating representations of Berlusconi's politically incorrect discourse in the British press, the chapter analyses a small but significant corpus of online news texts that focus on the former Italian leader's alleged use of two taboo expressions. Focussing on the reverberations of linguistic taboos in the process of meaning transfer from Italian into English, the chapter suggests that the renderings of these unsubstantiated utterances are ideologically slanted, consciously or unconsciously, to support the existing news narratives surrounding Berlusconi.

The Berlusconi years have witnessed Italy placed in the uncomfortable spotlight of the international media; however, now that Berlusconi's power has waned, a timely reflection is due on the extent to which the vestiges of the former Premier's cultural have coloured images of Italy in British news discourse. How far do cultural myths influence the selection, narration and reception of Italian news reported in British newspapers? Do Berlusconi's verbal gaffes reverberate in the construal of newsworthiness and evaluative parameters, reinforcing and perpetuating stereotypes of Italians as a whole? These are the key issues this contribution attempts to address. Stemming from a broader research project on the representation of Berlusconi's non politically correct language in the British press, this study examines the representation of certain aspects of Italian culture that have been the focus of British news narratives in recent years. Four recurring themes are explored and discussed: homophobia, racism, sexism and fascism. Implementing a critical discourse analysis approach, news texts retrieved from a cross-section of British newspapers reporting on Italian affairs are examined. The analysis then focuses on the invisibility of translation in reconstructing discursive events in news narratives across cultural and linguistic barriers, and suggests that decisions taken in translation solutions can reproduce and reinforce myths or stereotypes.

In one of his last appearances as presenter of Newsnight (BBC 20 May 2014), veteran political journalist Jeremy Paxman interviewed former Italian premier, Silvio Berlusconi. Three minutes into the voiced-over interpreter-mediated dialogue, the journalist known as "Newsnight’s Rottweiler-in-chief" (Siddique 2014) 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. A respected political journalist breaks politeness rules on British television using the f-word in a bald, on-record utterance while committing a face-threatening act against Silvio Berlusconi. The offending utterance is not, however, Paxman’s own. He is merely ‘quoting’ Berlusconi but quoting him through translation. Berlusconi’s alleged sobriquet for Merkel, culona inchiavabile [unscrewable big arse],  was widely reported in the international media in its translated form, yet the insult cannot legitimately be defined as a quotation for the very reason that there was no evidence that he did in fact say those words (Filmer, forthcoming). Newsnight is pre-recorded. The taboo nature of the utterance, magnified through the target language rendering could have prompted the BBC to bleep it out. Instead, the BBC chose not to censure the offending term. On the contrary, Paxman’s subversion of censorship was ‘leaked’ to the British press before the programme was actually aired. The "news" that Paxman’s audacious question had ‘stunned’ Berlusconi (Brady 2014a, 2014b; Siddique 2014) triggered a series of intertextual discourse chains (Fairclough 1995) across the gamut of the British press and in the social media. The episode elicits a series of intriguing questions that this contribution aims to explore. Combining approaches from ethnomethodology with critical discourse analysis (CDA), the triangulated methodological framework has been designed to shed light on interconnected aspects of the communicative event from a translation studies perspective. The first focuses on its technical and linguistic construction; the (instrumental?) choice of voiceover actor, the editing, and the use of translation and interpreting to overcome linguistic barriers. Some significant examples of divergence from source to voiceover target text are discussed. The second aspect asks what motives, ideological or other, prompted the editorial decision to allow such offensive language in the television interview. Did the obscenity escape the censorship net because it was ostensibly relayed through translation? Was Paxman’s question planned or improvised? Was the interpreter advised beforehand? Providing insight on the social actor’s perspective, as journalist and TV presenter, Jeremy Paxman’s views were sought on the role of interpreting and voiceover techniques in the Berlusconi interview. A series of open-ended questions were put to him via email communication (22 January 2015) yielding valuable data analysed here (section 6). The third aspect of the study relates to the discursive construction of the event and outlines the intertextual chains (Fairclough 1995) it generated. A review of British newspaper coverage of the interview is offered through the analysis of a small dataset adopting approaches from critical discourse analysis (Fairclough 2003; Schäffner 2004). Finally, the contribution offers some closing remarks and directions for future research. What follows below is a brief overview of salient research on the specific fields of voiceover, and selected works on media interpreting relevant to this study.

This contribution focuses on voice-over translation as a form of intercultural communication. The pilot study discussed here aims to investigate the role of voice-over techniques such as revoicing, narration and simultaneous interpreting in negotiating Italian cultural identity in non-fiction BBC broadcasts. The study is divided into five parts. The theoretical perspectives underpinning the research, narrative theory, imagology and critical discourse analysis are introduced in the first sections. An overview of the literature on voice-over translation follows in section two, while sections three, four and five present the analyses of three mini case studies spanning three non-fiction genres. The contribution concludes with some tentative observations and directions for further research. ARTICLE HISTORY

This contribution discusses some preliminary findings of a small-scale survey on the linguistic response to the arrivals in Sicily of migrants1 who cross the Mediterranean Sea. The project, entitled “Sicily - the Backdoor to Europe: the real conditions of mediating and interpreting during migrant emergencies on the South East coast of Sicily” is connected with a broader project on crisis translation (Federici 2016) and with my postdoctoral fellowship at Catania University’s School of Modern Languages in Ragusa. The study aims to investigate how
intercultural mediators, NGO operators working around ports and reception centres in Eastern Sicily, and the "end-users" themselves, the asylum seekers, refugees and 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.

This 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.

... Rome: Aracne, pp.27-42. Chiaro, Delia, Heiss, Christina, and Bucaria, Chiara (eds). 2008. ... In Juana M. Liceras (ed). Proceedings of the 6 th Generative Approaches to Second Language Acquisition Conference (GASLA 2002). Somerville, MA: Cascadilla Proceedings Project. ...

Do ‘wop’ or ‘greaseball’ carry the same semantic meaning asmangiamaccheroni? Is muso giallo an adequate translation of ‘chink’ or‘zipperhead’? Do such insults exist in the Italian lingua-culture or are theyinventions of audiovisual translators? Controversial and politically loaded,racial slurs have been studied from various interdisciplinary perspectives butfrom a Translation Studies standpoint this culture-bound lexical minefield islargely unexplored. The present enquiry investigates the meaning transferof racial insults and taboo language across the language pairEnglish/Italian. In a case study of the film Gran Torino (2008), offensivelanguage in the original film script is analysed from a CDA perspective andcompared with the renderings in the dubbed version. Strategies andoutcomes of the translation process are discussed in the light of theideological, cultural and sociolinguistic impact of the translator’s choices onthe target text and on the receiving culture as a whole. Students, scholars,and practitioners of translation and intercultural communication will findthe book a challenging and original reflection on cross-cultural meaningtransfer of societal taboo

Do insults like ‘wop’ and ‘greaseball’ carry the same semantic meaning as mangiamaccheroni [maccheroni eater]? Is muso giallo [yellow muzzle] an adequate translation of ‘chink’ or ‘zipperhead’? More to the point, would a native Italian speaker actually utter such expressions? Do they exist in the linguistic and cultural context of Italy or are they simply the invention of audiovisual translators? Controversial and politically loaded, the issues surrounding racial slurs and ethnic epithets have been the subject of various interdisciplinary enquiries; from sociology (Duane 2006) and discursive psychology (Potter and Wetherell 1992; Wetherell 2003) to the multidisciplinary approach (van Dijk 1998), discourse analysis (Reisigl and Wodak 2001) and linguistic anthropology (Allan and Burridge 2006). Yet, from the point of view of translation studies, this culture-bound lexical minefield remains an underdeveloped area of research.
This chapter outlines some sociolinguistic and cultural considerations regarding meaning transfer of linguistic taboos in the language pair English/Italian. In a case study of the film Gran Torino (Eastwood 2008), racist and taboo language is analysed in the source text (ST), and compared with target text (TT) solutions examining the techniques and strategies adopted in the translation process . A pilot study carried out during classroom investigations with cultural mediation students is included here as a starting point for discussion on the reception and perception of race talk across cultures.

This volume explores some of the un
-
derlying mechanisms that influence
the ways in which news producers sha
-
pe knowledge on cultural difference.
Viewing translation within a broader
framework of intercultural communica
-
tion, the qualitative study examines the
construction of translation-mediated
news, focussing on two Italian political
figures: Silvio Berlusconi and Matteo Sal
-
vini. 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

Introduction

The words we use and how we use them shape and reveal our world view, yet by the same token those choices of expression are mediated by the flux and flow of social mores and linguistic taboos. Until recent years swearwords and foul language were conceived as transgressing codes of ‘decent behaviour’, incurring rebuke, censure or even litigation (Hughes 2006: xv). Today, the shock potential of blasphemy has lost its
sting, while swearing, cursing, and ‘rude words’ have become an established part of the linguistic environment, indeed a part of British cultural history (see Gorji 2007).Changes in the structure and composition of contemporary societies and the advent of
political correctness have engendered a shift in linguistic taboos. Four letter words have been surpassed: racial slurs and ethnic epithets are now the last linguistic taboo in Anglophone contexts (see Allan and Burridge 2006; Hughes 2006; Gorji 2007). Controversial and ideologically loaded, racial slurs spawn ‘race rows’ in journalistic meta-discourse and intertextual media debates. Fuelled by discussions on the politically correct, public opinion oscillates; are racial slurs offensive relics of
colonialism and radical racism or innocuous manifestations of ethnic humour? Knotty questions, no doubt, but if the gamut of racial epithets in the English language is now problematic within English language contexts, what enormous challenges do they represent for intercultural communication and translation? Can their deeper semantic meanings, embedded in their socio-cultural and historical specificity, be rendered
across linguistic and cultural barriers? For Translation Studies and the translator the dilemmas are many. This study reflects on the culture-bound nature of this lexical minefield, by choosing a challenging source text (ST), Gran Torino (2008), and its rendering into Italian (2009), as a source of examples stemming from actual practice in translating racial slurs. Subsequently, the investigation explores some of the implications this has on translation strategies adopted in subsequent target text renderings. The enquiry then looks beyond the text so as to consider the role of the translator and the translation norms of the receiving culture in constructing the target culture product, thus engaging with wider discussions on the translation of ideology and the ideology of translation
(Hatim and Mason 1997). Racial discourse has been the object of study for a select number of scholars in both European and English Speaking contexts since the early 1980s (Billig 2001; Duane 2003; T.A. van Dijk 1983, 1987, 1992, 1997, 2004, 2007; Wetherell 2003; Wodak 2001, 2003 et al). They have approached the subject from various disciplinary
and interdisciplinary perspectives (Discourse Studies, Ideology, Social Psychology, sociolinguistics, Socio-Historical, Anthropology) thereby providing a general theoretical framework within which to locate this research. The thrust of previous scholarship in the field of race talk and text has however tended to engage with implicit, if no less pernicious forms of racism, and not on explicit racial slurs per se, and even
less so from a cross-cultural perspective. In fact very few investigations, as discussed in Chapter 3 and 4, focus on the translation and transmission of racial slurs or on how cultural differences between English-speaking countries and Italy influence the use and
the reporting of racial insults via the media. From the points of view of translation studies and sociolinguistics, these issues constitute an area of study yet to be examined to its full potential. The research question
The aims of this enquiry are two-fold; at micro-level, the first objective focuses on ethnophaulisms, their culture-linked use, and their renderings in the film dubbed version of the film Gran Torino (2008) with reference to the language pair English/Italian. In order to do this some underlying questions needed to be explored beforehand. Firstly, what constitutes a ‘racial slur’ today? Why does the English language possess a vast array of racial terms while there is an apparent dearth of such  ‘A contemptuous expression for (a member of) a people or ethnic group; an expression containing a disparaging allusion to another people or ethnic group.’ OED. expressions in neostandard Italian2 . How are these expressions perceived within the two cultures in question and have ideas changed over the last 20 years as to what constitutes race talk within the respective lingua-cultures? This last question leads to the crux of
this study which engages with the question of their translatability. If racial slurs are inextricably culture-bound, context-dependent and temporally contingent, can adequate translation solutions be found in the target language, and if not, what are the consequences for the target text? With the purpose of exploring these questions a case study of the film Gran Torino (dir. by Eastwood, 2008) analyses examples of racist and offensive language from the original film script in view of their significance in character portrayal, aesthetical value and their function in the construction of the film’s narrative.

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This chapter discusses some of the interwoven issues concerning translation, imagology, and ideology in the news. Part of a larger project investigating representations of Silvio Berlusconi’s politically incorrect discourse in the British press, the chapter analyses a small but significant corpus of online news texts that focus on the Italian leader’s alleged use of two taboo expressions. The first is “Forza Gnocca” [“Go Pussy”], a suggested new name for his People of Freedom political party (2011). Berlusconi’s purported soubriquet, ‘Culona inchiavabile’ [unscrewable big arse], for Angela Merkel is the second discursive ploy examined. Focusing on the reverberations of linguistic taboos in the process of meaning transfer from Italian into English, the chapter suggests that renderings of these unsubstantiated utterances are ideologically slanted, consciously or unconsciously, to support existing news narratives surrounding Berlusconi.

This chapter discusses some of the interwoven issues concerning translation, imagology, and ideology in the news. Part of a larger project investigating representations of Silvio Berlusconi’s politically incorrect discourse in the British press, the chapter analyses a small but significant corpus of online news texts that focus on the Italian leader’s alleged use of two taboo expressions. The first is “Forza Gnocca” [“Go Pussy”], a suggested new name for his People of Freedom political party (2011). Berlusconi’s purported soubriquet, ‘Culona inchiavabile’ [unscrewable big arse], for Angela Merkel is the second discursive ploy examined. Focusing on the reverberations of linguistic taboos in the process of meaning transfer from Italian into English, the chapter suggests that renderings of these unsubstantiated utterances are ideologically slanted, consciously or unconsciously, to support existing news narratives surrounding Berlusconi.

Prime Minister’s Question Time (PMQs) is a political discourse genre with a long and distinguished history. Framed by formulaic forms of address, the exchanges follow a set of turn-taking “rules” that has evolved over time. The study presented here examines the (non)use of honorifics and other polite forms intrinsic to PMQs during interactions between two female Prime Ministers and their respective Leaders of the Opposition: Margaret Thatcher and Neil Kinnock, Theresa May and Jeremy Corbyn. From diachronic and gendered perspectives, the study implements a mixed methods framework to address the following research questions: 1) has the use of formal politeness markers decreased over time? 2) Do gender dynamics influence impoliteness strategies in the context of PMQs? 3) In the shift from verbal to written discourse, what diamesic transformations appear in the official parliamentary transcriptions? The self-built corpus includes selected video recordings of PMQs from each of the Prime ...

According to political philosopher, Thomas Nail, “The twenty-first century will be the century of the migrant” (2015, 1). In 2015 alone over one million human beings, mainly from Syria, Afghanistan and Iraq, risked their lives in unseaworthy vessels to reach the shores of Europe.1 An unparalleled humanitarian phenomenon in terms of scale - migration itself is part of the human condition (cf. Jayawardena, 1995: vii; Nyers, 2013) – the so-called “migrant crisis” has fuelled extreme xenophobic tendencies in popular political discourse throughout the European continent, reflected in equally inflammatory media coverage. Many British newspapers, for instance, have been roundly condemned by global humanitarian agencies, particularly for “the language used”2 to narrate events ensuing from the migratory flow. Italian newspapers have also come under criticism from national human rights organisations, while journalists from both countries have been sued for the lexical choices employed to denote migrants.3 A selected sample of these discursive representations produced by British and Italian news media constructed through the language of conflict are the focus of this contribution. Two mini-case studies analyse small but significant datasets around two key texts that generated meta-linguistic debate in media discourse chains (Fairclough, 1995). The study is divided into two parts. The first offers the theoretical rationale for the qualitative critical approaches adopted and explains the methods used. The second part focuses on the analysis. Considering news as narrative (Baker, 2006; Lopocaro, 2006), the contribution analyses the following discursive events that took place in 2015. The first occurred in the midst of the “Calais Crisis”, as The Sun stirred heated debate with the editorial “migrants are like cockroaches” (Hopkins 17 April 2015). The second was the consequence of the Paris bombings; the then editor of the Italian newspaper Libero (Belpietro 14 November 2015), published a front page editorial under the headline “Bastardi Islamici”, generating discussions as to the legality and ethics of such a title. The contribution concludes with some tentative indications of audience response via readers’ below the line comments to these particularly provocative news texts and a reflection on the status quo of racism in the news after nearly thirty-five years of CDA.

According to political philosopher, Thomas Nail, “The twenty-first century will be the century of the migrant” (2015, 1). In 2015 alone over one million human beings, mainly from Syria, Afghanistan and Iraq, risked their lives in unseaworthy vessels to reach the shores of Europe.1 An unparalleled humanitarian phenomenon in terms of scale - migration itself is part of the human condition (cf. Jayawardena, 1995: vii; Nyers, 2013) – the so-called “migrant crisis” has fuelled extreme xenophobic tendencies in popular political discourse throughout the European continent, reflected in equally inflammatory media coverage. Many British newspapers, for instance, have been roundly condemned by global humanitarian agencies, particularly for “the language used”2 to narrate events ensuing from the migratory flow. Italian newspapers have also come under criticism from national human rights organisations, while journalists from both countries have been sued for the lexical choices employed to denote migrants.3 A selected sample of these discursive representations produced by British and Italian news media constructed through the language of conflict are the focus of this contribution. Two mini-case studies analyse small but significant datasets around two key texts that generated meta-linguistic debate in media discourse chains (Fairclough, 1995). The study is divided into two parts. The first offers the theoretical rationale for the qualitative critical approaches adopted and explains the methods used. The second part focuses on the analysis. Considering news as narrative (Baker, 2006; Lopocaro, 2006), the contribution analyses the following discursive events that took place in 2015. The first occurred in the midst of the “Calais Crisis”, as The Sun stirred heated debate with the editorial “migrants are like cockroaches” (Hopkins 17 April 2015). The second was the consequence of the Paris bombings; the then editor of the Italian newspaper Libero (Belpietro 14 November 2015), published a front page editorial under the headline “Bastardi Islamici”, generating discussions as to the legality and ethics of such a title. The contribution concludes with some tentative indications of audience response via readers’ below the line comments to these particularly provocative news texts and a reflection on the status quo of racism in the news after nearly thirty-five years of CDA.

Based 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. Key-words: homosexual identity, dubbing, biopics, cross-cultural pragmatics, sociolinguistics, film studies.

In 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 ...

Do ‘wop’ or ‘greaseball’ carry the same semantic meaning asmangiamaccheroni? Is muso giallo an adequate translation of ‘chink’ or‘zipperhead’? Do such insults exist in the Italian lingua-culture or are theyinventions of audiovisual translators? Controversial and politically loaded,racial slurs have been studied from various interdisciplinary perspectives butfrom a Translation Studies standpoint this culture-bound lexical minefield islargely unexplored. The present enquiry investigates the meaning transferof racial insults and taboo language across the language pairEnglish/Italian. In a case study of the film Gran Torino (2008), offensivelanguage in the original film script is analysed from a CDA perspective andcompared with the renderings in the dubbed version. Strategies andoutcomes of the translation process are discussed in the light of theideological, cultural and sociolinguistic impact of the translator’s choices onthe target text and on the receiving culture as a whole. Students, scholars,and practitioners of translation and intercultural communication will find the book a challenging and original reflection on cross-cultural meaning transfer of societal taboo

This 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.

The thesis examines the representation of Silvio Berlusconi’s language in the British press through the reverberations of linguistic taboos when translated from Italian into English. The analysis is set within the overarching premise that ‘Linguistic relations are always relations of symbolic power’ (Bourdieu 1992: 142). In order to navigate through the analyses, the trajectory of Berlusconi and his language is first set against the Italian sociolinguistic and historico-political backdrop. Then, through a triangulation of methodological approaches, the study attempts to understand some of the underlying mechanisms that influence the ways in which news producers shape knowledge on cultural difference. Critical Discourse Analysis methods are used to reveal the implicit propositions and evaluative translational choices in three datasets of online news texts drawn from British quality and tabloid newspapers. The first dataset examines news narratives on Berlusconi’s sexist and taboo lan...

This 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 St...

Introduction Gieve and Norton (2007, 2010) have argued that the linguistic representation of “foreigners” in non-fiction British broadcasting has considerable “ideological impact on the discursive construction of identity, and cross-cultural relationships” (2010, p. 208). According to the authors, linguistic difference in documentary, travel and lifestyle television genres is flattened or even erased. Consequently, communication between speakers of different languages is routinely portrayed as "smooth, unproblematic, and everyday” (Gieve and Norton, 2010, p. 206). The reconstructed reality (Orero, 2006, p. 2) inherent in these genres is achieved through transfer modes such as voice-over translation, revoicing, narration, and simultaneous interpreting, which in turn give rise to "the peculiar situation of two people apparently speaking to each other in different languages” (Gieve and Norton, 2007, p. 200). Voice-over is also used to convey meaning in translation-mediated au...

In one of his last appearances as presenter of Newsnight (BBC 20 May 2014), veteran political journalist Jeremy Paxman interviewed former Italian premier, Silvio Berlusconi. Three minutes into the voiced-over interpreter-mediated dialogue, the journalist known as "Newsnight’s Rottweiler-in-chief" (Siddique 2014) 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. A respected political journalist breaks politeness rules on British television using the f-word in a bald, on-record utterance while committing a face-threatening act against Silvio Berlusconi. The offending utterance ...

According to political philosopher, Thomas Nail, “The twenty-first century will be the century of the migrant” (2015, 1). In 2015 alone over one million human beings, mainly from Syria, Afghanistan and Iraq, risked their lives in unseaworthy vessels to reach the shores of Europe.1 An unparalleled humanitarian phenomenon in terms of scale - migration itself is part of the human condition (cf. Jayawardena, 1995: vii; Nyers, 2013) – the so-called “migrant crisis” has fuelled extreme xenophobic tendencies in popular political discourse throughout the European continent, reflected in equally inflammatory media coverage. Many British newspapers, for instance, have been roundly condemned by global humanitarian agencies, particularly for “the language used”2 to narrate events ensuing from the migratory flow. Italian newspapers have also come under criticism from national human rights organisations, while journalists from both countries have been sued for the lexical choices employed to denot...