Entertainment and the new media have grown from strength to strength in the light of a new scenario that involves an ever-increasing use of information for a wide range of interests and communication purposes. In fact, the consumption of entertainment has benefitted from the rise and the global use of social media, thus triggering the development of appropriate discourses even for specialised purposes (Herring 2015). In this scenario, sport teams and/or competitions have unlocked the potential offered by these tools to raise their visibility to establish closer contact with their supporters and to consolidate their affiliation, thus opening up new markets and economic opportunities. For this reason, international teams need multilingual policies in order to pursue this strategy (Meledandri 2014). Within this framework, one interesting language event is represented by live-tweeting, that is an up-to-date account of crucial sport events such as live matches via specific social media platforms (e.g. Twitter). The narration of these events depends on both language- and non-language-related variables such as the effectiveness and rapidity of the message provided as well as the use of a concise number of words due to the space constraints imposed by the platform (Zappavigna 2012). This study analyses multilingual social media accounts of Italian football teams with a focus on the narration of live events. In particular, this overview provides an analysis of the translation strategies used in designing multilingual policies, and examines the kind of translation provided in live-tweeting sessions. Results show that multilingual accounts tend to provide ‘parallel’ or ‘similar’ translations compared with the source language (Italian), thus creating a synergy between the strategies adopted by different stakeholders in Multilingual Social Media Teams. Nonetheless, some variance in terms of ‘translation spaces’ (Meledandri 2018) and non-verbal elements – such as multimedia contents – is also observed, the latter enriching the distinctiveness of these new forms of communication showing a specific though popularised lexis (Lavric et al. 2008) for an ever-growing international audience.
Translation Goes Live-Tweeting: An Analysis Of Multilingual And Multimodal Narration Of Football Events
Francesco Meledandri
2021-01-01
Abstract
Entertainment and the new media have grown from strength to strength in the light of a new scenario that involves an ever-increasing use of information for a wide range of interests and communication purposes. In fact, the consumption of entertainment has benefitted from the rise and the global use of social media, thus triggering the development of appropriate discourses even for specialised purposes (Herring 2015). In this scenario, sport teams and/or competitions have unlocked the potential offered by these tools to raise their visibility to establish closer contact with their supporters and to consolidate their affiliation, thus opening up new markets and economic opportunities. For this reason, international teams need multilingual policies in order to pursue this strategy (Meledandri 2014). Within this framework, one interesting language event is represented by live-tweeting, that is an up-to-date account of crucial sport events such as live matches via specific social media platforms (e.g. Twitter). The narration of these events depends on both language- and non-language-related variables such as the effectiveness and rapidity of the message provided as well as the use of a concise number of words due to the space constraints imposed by the platform (Zappavigna 2012). This study analyses multilingual social media accounts of Italian football teams with a focus on the narration of live events. In particular, this overview provides an analysis of the translation strategies used in designing multilingual policies, and examines the kind of translation provided in live-tweeting sessions. Results show that multilingual accounts tend to provide ‘parallel’ or ‘similar’ translations compared with the source language (Italian), thus creating a synergy between the strategies adopted by different stakeholders in Multilingual Social Media Teams. Nonetheless, some variance in terms of ‘translation spaces’ (Meledandri 2018) and non-verbal elements – such as multimedia contents – is also observed, the latter enriching the distinctiveness of these new forms of communication showing a specific though popularised lexis (Lavric et al. 2008) for an ever-growing international audience.I documenti in IRIS sono protetti da copyright e tutti i diritti sono riservati, salvo diversa indicazione.
