This paper introduces a novel phonopragmatic approach to the analysis of a corpus of ‘migration movies’ employed as teaching material in university courses of ELF for intercultural mediators. The pragmatic implications of the dialogic cues by a number of ELF-speaking characters in films will be explored both qualitatively, in terms of conversation moves and acts occurring within specific contexts of intercul- tural communication, and quantitatively, through a phonopragmatic investigation of the acoustic analysis of speech, and of the phonological segmentation into intonation units and acoustic variations. The objective is to investigate the extent to which the illocutionary and perlocutionary dimensions of the movie interactions can actually find cross-cultural ‘phonopragmatic’ realizations accounting for linguacultural differences in the expression and recognition of conversational presuppositions in the different ELF varieties used by the characters in the selected movies. More specifically, some new moves and acts will be identified to justify cross-cultural miscommunication due to semantic inaccessibility and cultural unavailability in ELF interactions, together with their phonopragmatic realizations in conversation which are here explored by applying a number of prosodic parameters aimed at cue disambiguation in different ELF varieties, such as: vowel sounds in different morpho-syntactic positions and their duration; pitch and duration of tonic syllables and of syllables preceding syntactic boundaries; pause duration at phrase boundaries and their influence on syllabic duration. The relevance of this approach to the teaching of ELF to intercultural mediators will also be discussed.

This book examines the English lingua-franca (ELF) uses in a corpus of online and scripted video-game interactions. While research generally explores the playful and technological aspects of computer-mediated communication, this study focuses on the strategies of cooperation, language simplification and authentication, lexical creativity and meaning negotiation that are generally activated within the “community of practice of gamers” to facilitate cross-cultural conversations. The scripted exchanges, instead, are examined by means of the ALFA Model (Analysis of Lingua Franca in Audiovisual texts), which is devised to enquire into the extent to which the non-native participants’ language variations are part of the multimodal actualisation of the cognitive construct of “non-native speakers”, to which authors resort in order to prompt specific reactions on the part of the receivers. Finally, since the participants’ turns in both online and scripted interactions are visually represented as written messages on screen, this research also contributes to the development of the description of written ELF variations, so far not thoroughly explored in the literature.

This book introduces a novel approach to the analysis and translation of “migration movies”, featuring cross-cultural interactions in immigration domains. More specifically, it explores the extent to which the discursive and audiovisual constructions of movie characters representing non-native speakers of English stem from the script authors’ background knowledge of lingua-franca variations – marked by lexical, syntactic and phonetic deviations from the Standard English norms – which they turn into ‘scripted variations’ to represent status asymmetries in intercultural exchanges. Such asymmetries – this book contends – need to be rendered into equivalent linguacultural ways during the dubbing-translation process by resorting to parallel ‘scripted’ lingua-franca variations of the target language. To this purpose, the book introduces a number of stimulating translation strategies to be exploited in university courses of audio-visual translation and intercultural mediation

This paper analyses the Italian transcreation strategies for the subtitles of the video game Ni No Kuni: Wrath of the White Witch, to detail how the diatopic/diastratic variety of Romanesco (typical of Rome and its area) is adopted for the characterisation of Mr Drippy, in order to prompt a humorous effect due to the cognitive contrast (Attardo 2001) triggered by the counterfactual creature speaking an actual linguistic variety. The Italian script will also be examined from the pragmatic and technical perspectives, showing that the transcreative retextualisations are tailored to younger receivers, since explanations and alternative utterances are added to render the speakers’ intentionality more explicit, and noticing that the distribution of the longer target script in two- and three-line subtitles may arouse concerns in terms of readability (Perego, Taylor 2012). An alternative Italian translation strategy is then presented, where creativity and the respect for the source-text multimodal dimension are balanced to provide an equivalent characterisation for Raj, a man speaking with an Indian accent. Finally, the receivers’ perception of the conventional Italian transcreation strategies of humorous discourse in video games will be explored, by considering the players’ opinions and comments in dedicated websites.

Il libro raccoglie le relazioni al Seminario Testo interartistico e processi di comunicazione. Letteratura, arte, traduzione, comprensione. L’intento di questo incontro fu quello di rispondere alle esigenze manifestate dagli studenti di acquisire metodologie interdisciplinari utili alla comprensione, alla critica e alla traduzione-interpretazione di testi artistici, intendendo con “testo” anche ciò che è al di là della lingua verbale e che sconfina nei linguaggi non verbali. L’analisi si è dunque focalizzata sui testi interartistici, cioè su quei testi che implicano, per loro stessa natura, una compresenza di codici estetici e di processi comunicativi di matrice diversa. Ciò non ha escluso testi più prettamente letterari, con le loro riscritture nei linguaggi della pittura, del teatro, della musica, della danza, della pubblicità, nonché l’interpretazione con finalità teoriche, in grado di offrire strumenti di comprensione e critica di un testo filosofico, poetico, letterario.

This paper introduces an interdisciplinary research exploring the emotional experience of Italian seaside resorts whose geographical position in the Southern Mediterranean coasts has always determined their destiny as places of hospitality and hybridization of languages and cultures. A cognitive-pragmatic model of Experiential Linguistics and some strategies of Experiential Place Marketing will be applied to the ‘emotional promotion’ of Responsible Tourism in order to enquire into the effects of emotions upon the tourists’ perception of the holiday as an experience of ‘personal and cultural growth’. This is expected to develop from their appraisal of (a) non-western migrants’ dramatic narrations of journeys across the sea, reported in their variations of English as a ‘lingua franca’ (ELF), and (b) epic narratives of Mediterranean ‘odysseys’ towards ‘Utopian destinations’ belonging to the western cultural heritage, translated from ancient (Greek and Latin) into modern ELF variations. The target of the marketing plan are tourists playing the role of ‘intercultural mediators’ with migrants in one of the seaside resorts of Salento, a southern-Italian area affected by migrant arrivals. To facilitate the tourists’ process of ‘experiential embodiment’ of past and present dramatic sea voyages, the cultural project of Responsible Tourism is designed to introduce tourists and migrants to an ‘Ethnopoetic analysis’ of two corpora of modern and ancient oral sea voyage narratives – the former collected during ethnographic fieldworks in reception centres for refugees, and the latter including extracts from Homer’s Odyssey and Virgil’s Aeneid. The purpose is to directly involve tourists and migrants as if they were ‘philologists’ and ‘ethnographers’ exploring how such ancient and modern oral narratives are organized into spontaneous ‘verse structures’ reproducing the sequences and rhythms of human actions and emotions in response to the traumatic experience of violent natural phenomena which, through the use of ergative syntactic structures, become metaphorically personified as mythological monsters, or as objects and elements endowed with an autonomous, dynamic force capable of destroying the human beings at their mercy. The Ethnopoetic analysis and translation, together with the subsequent multimodal rendering of such journey narratives into a promotional video for place-marketing purposes aim at making both tourists and migrants aware of the common socio-cultural values of the different populations that have produced them.

This paper explores the socio-cultural and linguistic characterisations of a group of migrant workers in both original English and Italian dubbed/subtitled versions of the migration movie It’s a Free World... (In questo mondo libero..., Ken Loach, 2007). Scenes are selected on the basis of their relevance to the main objective of the study, i.e. to analyse the pragmalinguistic aspects of the perception of the migrant workers in their work context characterized by power-asymmetry relationships between high-status SE speakers and low-status immigrants. It is argued that in this movie ELF variations should be identified not only in the lexico-syntactic properties of the language, but in the asymmetrical relations identified in the dialogic ‘moves’ (Guido, 2008) and distinctive traits of the speech (brevity of sentences, disfluency of rhythm) also within a comparative-discourse framework (cf. Brown & Yule, 1983; Provenzano, 2008) as well as in relation to the perlocutionary dimension of the dubbing translation, since the source and target scripts of a number of selected interactions shall be analysed in order to enquire into the Italian translation strategies for the dubbing and subtitles. In fact, the dubbed version resorts to Italian lingua-franca reformulation strategies by means of specific lexical and structural features deviating from standard uses (Seidlhofer, 2011), consistent with the original illocutionary and perlocutionary dimensions (Austin, 1962). Subtitles, instead, because of spatial and temporal constraints (Díaz Cintas, 2005; Neves, 2009), condense the original utterances (Bogucki, 2011) and retextualising the features of the ELF variation adopted into standard Italian, providing a target version that is not the pragmalinguistic equivalent of the source script.

This paper enquires into the scripted ELF variation adopted in the English subtitling of Lamerica (Gianni Amelio, 1994). The target script reformulates the original interactions through Lingua-franca Italian by means of hybridization processes between spoken Italian lingua franca uses and written ELF rendering that are seen as enabling/failing to realize the complex unequal encounters in contexts of specialized (legal-bureaucratic) communication between low-status Albanians and high-status Italians. The analysis of the spoken interactions rendered into ELF subtitling involves three different, yet complementary dimensions of analysis: the register dimension in the perspective of Halliday’s (1978) functional approach and of van Dijk’s (1980) processes of deletion, construction and generalization in rendering the original social interactions into ELF subtitling, respecting the technical limits and facilitating accessibility and acceptability of culture-bound concepts either between the participants in the interaction and in the international audience of the subtitled movie; the phonopragmatic dimension (Sperti, 2014) of the spoken interactions to explore the socio-pragmatic processes accounting for illocutionary and perlocutionary implications (Searle, 1983), and the rendering of such dimensions characterizing the cross-cultural unequal encounters into equivalent written forms of ELF; and the functional dimension involving the standard and scripted ELF variations used in the subtitles, analysed through the application of a causal model of translation (Chesterman, 2000; Bogucki, 2011), enquiring into the cognitive and pragmatic features of the translator’s retextualizations, characterised by relevant lexical and syntactic choices in the attempt to render the participants’ status asymmetries. ELF in this case may thus represent a new hybrid mode of spoken lingua franca rendered into written forms in situations of difficult intercultural communication due to power/status asymmetries between the participants.

This chapter investigates the use of humour strategies to popularize scientific knowledge in the American sitcom The Big Bang Theory, whose characters embody the opposition between the groups of ‘specialists’ – represented by the four male science post-graduates—and of ‘non-experts’ – represented by their neighbour, a young less educated waitress. The analysis of a corpus of scripts reveals that the lexical and syntactic features of popularization aim at reformulating scientific knowledge (cf. Shane and Whitley 1985), which is thus made accessible for the general audience by means of processes of intralingual translation resorting to non-technical language (cf. Gotti 1996; 2003) or metaphors (Lakoff and Johnson 1980). Scripts are also characterized by the peculiar integration between the linguistic features of popularization and the cognitive and socio-cultural humour strategies, marking the irrelevance of an overspecialized language and producing a disparaging representation of the four male friends. Finally, the analysis of two conversations between the post-graduates are compared to examples of popularization, demonstrating that the neutralization of any schematic distance between senders and recipients produces interactions marked as instances of scientific exposition (Widdowson 1979), where the cooperation maxims of quality, quantity, relevance and manner are shared (Grice 1975).

This chapter deals with a research carried out at the University of Salento, which investigates the support of multimodal transcription at the time of analysing and translating the audiovisual texts that are characterised by genre hybridisation. A group of undergraduate students was asked to produce an Italian reformulation of the video A Beginner’s Guide to Gender-neutral Restrooms (NBC News), available on YouTube, which displays a peculiar interaction between the journalistic discourse, the humorous one grounded on socio-cultural stereotypes and derogatory representations (Zillman 1983), and the ‘video guide’ genre. Since the target versions stem from the adoption of an original model of multimodal transcription, this contribution shall help to explore the extent to which the critical analysis (Fairclough 2010) of the linguistic and extralinguistic construction facilitates the awareness of how the locutionary, illocutionary and perlocutionary levels (Austin 1962) are conveyed by means of the fusion of the verbal, visual and acoustic dimensions. Finally, the responses to two questionnaires before and after analysing and adapting the selected video will be considered as well, so as to detail the influence of the type of transcription under discussion on the selection of the most appropriate translation mode.

This paper introduces the ‘Interactive Model’ of audiovisual translation developed in the context of my PhD research on the cognitive-semantic, functional and socio-cultural features of the Italian-dubbing translation of a corpus of humorous texts. The Model is based on two interactive macro-phases – ‘Multimodal Critical Analysis of Scripts’ (MuCrAS) and ‘Multimodal Re-Textualization of Scripts’ (MuReTS). Its construction and application are justified by a multidisciplinary approach to the analysis and translation of audiovisual texts, so as to focus on the linguistic and extralinguistic dimensions affecting both the reception of source texts and the production of target ones (Chaume 2004; Díaz Cintas 2004). By resorting to Critical Discourse Analysis (Fairclough 1995, 2001), to a process-based approach to translation and to a socio-semiotic analysis of multimodal texts (van Leeuwen 2004; Kress and van Leeuwen 2006), the Model is meant to be applied to the training of audiovisual translators and discourse analysts in order to help them enquire into the levels of pragmalinguistic equivalence between the source and the target versions. Finally, a practical application shall be discussed, detailing the Italian rendering of a comic sketch from the American late-night talk show Conan

This paper explores the linguistic and audiovisual features of medical-discourse reformulation in a selected corpus of English and Italian scripts from the TV shows 1000 Ways to Die (1000 modi per morire), Curious and Unusual Deaths (Strani modi per morire), and Rare Anatomy (Rare Anatomy: Casi estremi), which actualize new forms of popularization by mixing journalistic, documentary and humorous discourses with reality-TV and docudrama genres. The analysis is grounded on a cognitive-functional approach, according to which the authors’ mental representation of the implied receivers in uences the process of text construction, thus aiming at making specialized knowledge more accessible by means of different strategies of speech hybridization that are tailored to the imagined audience. In particular, regarding source-text production, the authors of the first and second TV shows seem to have in mind male viewers, since they resort to a specific integration between taboo jokes, derogatory humour and lexical reformulation accessible to non-experts. At the same time, the third TV series adopts mainly the conventional strategies of linguistic simplification to explain specialized knowledge, along with the emotional presentation of real stories about rare diseases. The analysis focuses on the interaction between the extralinguistic features and verbal characteristics of audiovisual scripts so as to help describe multimodal popularization, which can now be found in a number of different text types, from magazines to sitcoms. Finally, this study also inquires into the extent to which the lexical, structural and functional dimensions of the selected corpus of target versions stem from the interaction between the equivalent reformulation of medical discourse and the respect for the technical limits of voice-over.

This article explores the emotional experience of Italian seaside resorts whose geographical position in the Southern Mediterranean coasts has always determined their destiny as places of hospitality and hybridization of languages and cultures. A Cognitive-pragmatic Model of Experiential Linguistics (Lakoff, Johnson 1999; Langacker 1991; Sweetser 1990) and some strategies of Experiential Place Marketing (Hosany, Prayag 2011; Jani, Han 2013; Prayag et al. 2013) will be employed to ‘emotionally promote’ Responsible Tourism (Lin et al. 2014; Ma et al. 2013) in order to enquire into the effects of emotions upon the tourists’ experience of the holiday as a path towards their ‘personal and cultural growth’. The case study illustrated in this article represents precisely an instance of ELF communication developing from tourists’ and migrants’ appraisal of: (a) the contemporary non-Western migrants’ dramatic sea-voyage narratives reported in their ELF variations (Guido 2008, 2012), and (b) the epic narratives of Mediterranean ‘odysseys’ towards ‘utopian places’ belonging to the Western cultural heritage, translated from Ancient Greek and Latin into ELF. The subjects of this case study under analysis are tourists playing the role of ‘intercultural mediators’ with migrants in one of the seaside resorts of Salento affected by migrant arrivals. To facilitate tourists’ and migrants’ processes of ‘experiential embodiment’ of past and present dramatic sea voyages, they will be introduced to an ‘Ethnopoetic analysis’ (Hymes 1994, 2003) of two corpora of modern and ancient oral journey narratives – the former collected during ethnographic fieldworks in reception centres for refugees, and the latter including extracts from Homer’s Odyssey and Virgil’s Aeneid. The purpose is to make tourists and migrants play the roles of ‘philologists’ and ‘ethnographers’ as they realize how such ancient and modern oral narratives are experientially organized into spontaneous ‘verse structures’ reproducing the sequences and rhythms of human actions and emotions in response to the traumatic experience of violent natural phenomena which, through the use of ergative syntactic structures (Talmy 1988), become metaphorically personified as objects and elements endowed with an autonomous, dynamic force capable of destroying the human beings at their mercy. The Ethnopoetic analysis and translation, together with the subsequent multimodal rendering of such journey narratives into ‘premotional videos’ for place-marketing purposes (Kress 2009), aim at making both tourists and migrants aware of their common experiential roots, as well as of the socio-cultural values of the different populations that have produced them.

This book examines the Italian reformulation and retextualisation strategies of the humorous discourse in the animated TV series "Family Guy". In particular, three macro-areas of analysis are identified, one concerning religion and humour, one connected to taboo jokes, and one about cultural and historical references, in order to detail the linguistic and functional modifications to the source scripts. By means of the comparison between the original texts and their Italian translations, this book explores the extent to which the adaptation strategies are infuenced by specific cognitive and culture-bound constructs, from the implied receivers of cartoons, to the verbal features of such audiovisual text types.

This chapter illustrates the results of a workshop held at the University of Salento, during an English-Italian Translation Course. A group of undergraduate students was asked to produce an intralingual translation for the subtitles of the video Capsized in Lampedusa – Fortress Italia, which deals with the situation in Lampedusa after a boat capsized in October 2013. The original video – available on YouTube – is subtitled into English for Vice News and, in a ‘role play’ exercise (Rosnow 1990), students were commissioned to adopt a type of English that could be directed at a wider international audience also including non-native English speakers. The contrastive analysis of the original and reformulated versions is designed to enquire into the influence and actualisation of the commissioner’s requests in the lexical, structural and functional features of target texts. The extent will also be explored, to which the type of English adopted in the alternative subtitles can be defined as a lingua-franca variation (Seidlhofer 2011), due to the inclusion of specific verb tenses and the selection of simplified syntactic structures (Seidlhofer 2004), aimed at facilitating the audience’s reception and accessibility to the semantic dimensions of the text. Finally, the analysis will also highlight the translators’ attempts to respect the temporal and spatial constraints of subtitles (Neves 2009), as well as the multimodal construction (Kress and van Leeuwen 2006) of audiovisual texts, which result in the use of condensation strategies (Gottlieb 2005; Pedersen 2011), thus proposing the new definition of audiovisual mediation.

This book provides a theoretical and pratical framework for resarchers and practitioners who focus on the construction, intepretation and retextualisation of audiovisual texts. While existing research on audiovisual translation generally adopts a product-based perspective, examining the lexico-semantic and syntactic features of source and target versions, this book propose an "Interactive Model", in order to explore what happens in the translators' minds, as well as the influence of the interaction between the linguistic and extralinguistic dimensions in the construction and intepretation of audiovisual texts. The application of this Model to the analysis of a corpus of humorous films, TV series and video games foreground the integrato between the analysis of source-text features and the knowledge of the target linguacultural backgroundds in the creation of pragmalinguistic equivalente scripts. At the same time, this book also provides valuable insights into the audience's reception of these translations, by submitted close-ended and open-ended questionnaires to subjects representing empirical receivers, thus helping to evacuate the degree of linguistic and functional equivalence of target versions.

This study enquires into the representation of foreign characters in a number of American TV series, in order to identify how the socio-cultural and linguistic dimensions of the original characterisations are reformulated and adapted for Italian receivers. In particular, the analysis focuses on the representations of a group of Indian workers from The Simpsons, of two non-native speakers from Family Guy, and of a man from Outrageous Acts of Psych, so as to investigate the influence of the linguacultural background at the time of selecting the adaptation strategies and modifying the original illocutionary force and perlocutionary effects (Austin 1962). In order to prompt humorous responses, the original representations are based on the strategy of “power distance” (Guido 2012) as well as on cognitive contrasts of the possible/impossible and expected/unexpected types (Raskin 1985; Attardo 2001), whereas the Italian versions resort to regionalisms (Rossi 2007), diatopic/diastratic language varieties and stereotypical reproduction of the non-native pronunciation. This chapter will explore the levels of linguistic and functional equivalence achieved by the retextualisations, along with the ideological nature of the specific adaptation strategies, which stem from the translators’ interpretation of the source-text semantic and communicative dimensions. The influence of “ideology” (Fairclough 2015) is thus identified in the audiovisual and linguistic modifications to the source scripts, which eventually reveal the influence of the target linguacultural background in the activation of the cognitive construct of the ‘implied audience’, to which translators conventionally resort for the production of target versions that are tailored to the viewers’ expectations. Finally, the analysis will also enquire into the extent to which the target scripts produce non-natural representations (Yule 1996) from a multimodal perspective (Kress and van Leeuwen 2006), due to the interaction between the visual, acoustic and verbal features.

This study introduces an innovative ‘premotional’ marketing strategy for the emotional promotion of responsible luxury tourism in Apulia, labelled as “#Apulianluxury”, which has been developed for this specific research to increase the appeal of the region by focusing on its natural, social, and cultural properties. In particular, this paper will illustrate the cognitive and linguistic grounds of a number of premotional messages that aim at attracting potential receivers by activating in them an alternative perception of the holiday as an experience of cultural and personal growth. Such perception is stimulated by the interaction between the ‘luxury tourism’ and ‘responsible tourism’ schemata, which leads to the ‘expected’/‘unexpected’ cognitive oppositions in the examined advertisements. The analysis of the selected corpus of multimodal texts will enquire into the extent to which the lexical, structural and pragmatic attributes of English as a lingua franca interact with the visual features of the messages so as to provide the alternative view of the holiday, and increase the cross-cultural accessibility of this premotional campaign. In fact, the connection between the lexical and syntactic simplification strategies and the visual representations allow tourists to trigger the pragmatic inferences that determine the appropriate identification and interpretation of the illocutionary force and perlocutionary effects pursued by the Apulian characterization of responsible luxury tourism under discussion.

This paper illustrates a case study carried out at the University of Salento focused on the adoption of multimodal texts and video editing software to increase translators’ awareness of the influence of ideology, linguacultural background and the cognitive construct of “implied receivers” on language use and reformulation. Multimodal texts are seen as pedagogic tools that support the development of the alternative process of ‘audiovisual mediation’ to limit the selection of conventional localization and domestication strategies. The subjects, undergraduate foreign language students, were required to produce an Italian translation for the subtitles of humorous segments from "Conan" and "Late Show with David Letterman", which they embedded in the video files using dedicated software. After examining the original multimodal composition and humorous discourse, participants decided to address their translations to prevalently male viewers, familiar with American culture. By exploring the cognitive-functional and technical perspectives of the renderings, this study shall exemplify that the project has trained students in the achievement of pragmalinguistic equivalence through audiovisual mediation.