Images of turmoil. Italy portrayed in Britain and re-mirrored in Italy
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Maria Cristina Caimotto
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.
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.
Chapters in this book
- Prelim pages i
- Table of contents v
- On translated images, stereotypes and disciplines 1
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Translation and historical trajectories of images
- Translating identity 21
- The adventures of a Amsterdam Spaniard 37
- National images in transit 53
- The image of Spain in Flanders as shaped by the translations of Jozef Simons 69
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Translation and the construction of hetero-Images
- Englishness in German translations of Alice in Wonderland 87
- Champion of the humiliated and insulted or xenophobic satirist? 109
- Italians in films 127
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Translation and the reconstruction of hetero-images
- Comparing national images in translations of popular fiction 145
- Bel Paese or Spaghetti noir ? 163
- How Algeria’s multilingual condition and colonial history is obscured 181
- Translation as blockage, propagation and recreation of ethnic images 201
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Translation and auto-images
- The construction of national images through news translation 219
- Images of turmoil. Italy portrayed in Britain and re-mirrored in Italy 239
- Images of Italy? 257
- (Trans)forming national images in translation 277
- Nation in translation 299
-
Envoi
- Sundry remarks about a discipline in the making by an eye-witness 317
- Name index 325
- Subject index 329
Chapters in this book
- Prelim pages i
- Table of contents v
- On translated images, stereotypes and disciplines 1
-
Translation and historical trajectories of images
- Translating identity 21
- The adventures of a Amsterdam Spaniard 37
- National images in transit 53
- The image of Spain in Flanders as shaped by the translations of Jozef Simons 69
-
Translation and the construction of hetero-Images
- Englishness in German translations of Alice in Wonderland 87
- Champion of the humiliated and insulted or xenophobic satirist? 109
- Italians in films 127
-
Translation and the reconstruction of hetero-images
- Comparing national images in translations of popular fiction 145
- Bel Paese or Spaghetti noir ? 163
- How Algeria’s multilingual condition and colonial history is obscured 181
- Translation as blockage, propagation and recreation of ethnic images 201
-
Translation and auto-images
- The construction of national images through news translation 219
- Images of turmoil. Italy portrayed in Britain and re-mirrored in Italy 239
- Images of Italy? 257
- (Trans)forming national images in translation 277
- Nation in translation 299
-
Envoi
- Sundry remarks about a discipline in the making by an eye-witness 317
- Name index 325
- Subject index 329
