ESP Across Cultures 15

The five papers constituting volume 15 of ESP Across Cultures are written by scholars working in Italy, each concerned with a different aspect of specialized discourse but in all cases involving a comparison between English and Italian. In her paper, Flavia Cavaliere analyses the various translation strategies employed when providing subtitles in Italian on food-related themes in 25 films produced between 1972 and 2014. After highlighting the fact that subtitling requires ‘condensation’, and thus differs from the more standard forms of translation, the author explores in detail the complex relationship between language and culture in AudioVisual Translation. She concludes that, seen from a diachronic perspective, “the more recent the film, the more subtitlers opt for foreignization, hence promoting the ST culture”, with ever greater attention being given to cultural diversities in the 21st century. Massimiliano Demata looks at the Italian translations of three articles on Italian politics published in 2015 in the New York Times and the Financial Times. He examines “the discursive re-localization” of these three translations when they were circulated in the context of Italy’s politics and media, arguing that the three case studies discussed “are evidence that translation is used as an instrument of political legitimization (or delegitimization)”. He concludes that the case studies analysed prove that “translation itself is often heavily contested and that certain translations are considered to be ‘wrong’ because they are seen as the product of textual manipulation, with specific political interests in mind.” Daniele Franceschi provides a corpus-based multimodal investigation of spoken learner English produced by Italian mother-tongue university students simulating lawyer-client interviews as part of their in-course assessment tasks. The author pinpoints some of the recurrent difficulties Italian university students have in using both general and specialized English in the context of simulated lawyer-client interactions. His aim is “to cast light on student performance when using spoken legal English in order to propose new techniques for the improvement of didactic materials that are, still today, almost exclusively oriented towards teaching written legal language.” In their paper Michela Giordano and Antonio Piga explore from a cross-cultural perspective the communicative strategies adopted by the EU to gain consensus and promote its institutional project. They investigate the discursive devices and structures employed in EU brochures in Italian and in English in order to analyse to what extent the two different national contexts and languages influence the strategic features of EU informative material. They conclude that “there are no striking differences between the two versions of the booklets (despite some dissimilarities in the grammatical realization of the nP structure in the two languages).” Rosita Maglie looks at the language of scientific popularization through two main genres used in the pharmaceutical context: Patient Information Leaflets (PILs) and online video ads. The author analyses three drug categories (over-thecounter drugs, over-the-counter drugs with medical supervision, and drugs requiring medical prescription) in English and Italian: she also examines commercials for the same drugs found on YouTube. Through this multimodal analysis the author hopes to contribute to the expansion of “our knowledge of a new and popular way to spread medical knowledge across languages and cultures, which has been changing the physician-patient relationship from a merely informative to a meaningfully emotional point of view.”