Images of turmoil

Abstract

In the 1970s, Italy’s national identity was transformed and re-negotiated consequent to a number of tragic events and radical reforms. The country’s image and self-image were constantly revisited in domestic and foreign news features. To this day, the best-known verbal icon of that period remains the phrase “strategia della tensione” (strategy of tension), from the headline of an article in the British press. This highlights a tendency of the Italian newspapers to “look up” to the British newspapers. The aim of this chapter is to investigate how this tendency to prioritize British images of the Italian scenario, turning them into tropes, influenced the construction of Italy’s image between 1969 and 1980. A parallel corpus of articles from The Times and La Stampa is explored through a methodological framework combining diachronic News Translation Studies and the strategies of Imagology. Electronic querying and manual inspection of the corpus revealed cases of textual migration, consisting of textual segments in La Stampa mirroring excerpts from The Times. These migrated texts were identified and labelled according to the translation strategy employed – selective appropriations, permutations, omissions, and additions (Valdeón 2008) – in order to investigate potential agendas, gatekeeping or self-censorship practices. However, rather than display an agenda, this analysis seems to reveal a clash between the British image and Italy’s self-image in the troubled 1970s, the latter being constructed through heavy domestication of the British articles. Translation choices indeed reveal patterns of mitigation of criticism, as well as foregrounding of positive comments, which require a discourse-based approach in order to be fully understood. The strategies of Imagology – notably those applied to Translation Studies in recent work by van Doorslaer (2010) – prove particularly useful in detailing these findings, through close observation of the constructed images of the country.

The Image of China as a Destination for Tourist: Translation Strategies of Culture-Specific Items in the Chinese-English Food Menus

“…Following Koskinen’s (2012, p. 87) assertion, the question that comes to mind is what image is projected in respect of a particular strategy choice adopted in a translation activity, which contributes to the perception of “the outsiders” by that country. Despite the numerous studies on national image construction in translation studies (see Caimotto, 2016; Kim, 2017) and on CSIs translation investigation, most of the existing studies only focused on CSIs translation strategies without finding out what image is constructed in relation to strategy choice. Apart from Turzynski-Azimi’s (2020) research which investigated the categories of CSIs and the impact of their translation strategies on Japan’s image as a destination for tourists, no research has explored what CSI types condition which translation strategy choice and the image that the selected strategy projects in the construction of China’s image as a tourist destination.…”

8 | 1 | 2019 Recherches sur les compétences en intercompréhension : Développements du projet Miriadi

“…In the past fifteen years, the discipline of Translation Studies has started investigating journalistic translation (Valdeón 2015), drawing attention on a phenomenon that previous research had mostly ignored. The translation of news articles is mainly performed by journalists who were not trained as translators and the amount of changes deemed acceptable between source texts (STs) and target texts (TTs) is higher than for other text types, up to the point that it is often difficult to identify a ST and a TT (Davier, Schäffner, van Doorslaer 2018, 156) and analyses rather concentrate on migrated textual segments (Caimotto 2015). This paper overviews the advantages that can derive from the observation of translated texts in a foreign language classroom and provides practical information to set up a guided activity of translation observation and analysis of one of the most significant translation events on a global scale, the inaugural speech of the new President of the United States.…”