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ABSTRACT
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.
Il contributo esamina le potenzialità semiotiche delle strategie linguistiche e visive utilizzate da autorevoli testate anglofone per costruire ‘news' ruotanti intorno alla figura controversa del politico Italiano, Matteo Salvini. Fondandosi sui principi dell'analisi critica del discorso e della traduzione culturale, l'articolo ha il duplice obbiettivo di analizzare le rappresentazioni di Salvini come sinecdoche di ‘italianità' e di individuare il ruolo della traduzione nella costruzione del suo personaggio. L'ipotesi è che, sebbene l'ideologia che ispira la stampa in oggetto potesse essere vicina a quella di Salvini, i luoghi comuni e gli stereotipi sugli italiani finiscano per prevalere sull’allineamento politico.
Disclosure statement
No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author(s).
Notes
1 see Altahmazi, Citation2020, for one of the few studies on this theme.
3 OED Online.
4 Which could be loosely translated as ‘vaffanculo’ in Italian, or ‘go fuck yourself’ in a literal intralingual translation.
8 See Filmer, Citation2021 for a corpus based analysis of ideological cues as pre-modifiers in news discourse on Salvini.
9 The University of Bologna’s decision to adopt Passarelli and Tuorto’s (Citation2018) volume Salvini’s League. Extreme Right in Government on one of its political sciences courses was questioned by representatives from Italy’s governing League party in Emilia Romagna, which only served to fuel further criticism of worrying anti-intellectualism and authoritarian tendencies. https://www.independent.co.uk/voices/italy-far-right-salvini-lega-league-university-bologna-fascism-a8870736.html.
12 The translation is mine.
13 https://www.repubblica.it/speciali/politica/elezioni2018/2018/03/05/news/flop_neofascisti-190494095/.
15 The practice of sending refugees or asylum seekers back to their country or to another country where they are likely to suffer bad treatment (OED).
Additional information
Notes on contributors
Denise Filmer
Denise Filmer is a research fellow in the Department of Philology, Literature and Linguistics at the University of Pisa (Italy) where she also teaches English for specific purposes in the Department of Political Science. She holds a degree in Foreign Languages and Communication (University of Catania, Italy), an MA by Research (Durham University UK), and a PhD in Translation Studies (Durham University UK) funded by a Durham University Doctoral Scholarship. In 2017 she won a postdoctoral fellowship at the University of Catania's School of Modern Languages (Italy) for the project ‘The migration of meaning: semantic shifts, news translation, and the language of immigration in news discourse on the migrant crisis’. Her research interests pivot around ideology in translation, news and political discourse, journalistic translation, audiovisual translation, gender and sexuality in media discourse, imagology, intercultural mediation, and cross-cultural pragmatics.