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This contribution analyses the role played by translation in the emergence of the Italian transfeminist collective Onna Pas. The collective was born in 2019 after a series of workshops centred on the reading and translation of Wittig’s and Zeig’s work (1975). This contribution examines the formation of Onna Pas using the concept of affective performativity. Drawing on sociological theories of affect (Gregg and Seighworth 2010; Ahmed 2004) applied to translation (Koskinen 2020), according to which affect is a force arising in the “in-betweenness” of encounters (Gregg and Seigworth 2010, 2), I understand translation as both an affective practice that brings about “intense” joyful and playful encounters, and as a performative one capable of producing other translations, performances, objects, collectivities and alliances. I particularly explore the unpredictable outcome of translational encounters, contrary to studies of translation and activism (Baker 2013), which tend to stress the notion of conscious positionalities.

Over the last few decades, the migratory phenomenon, supported by social, economic, and political aspects, has become progressively intensified and structured, increasing its relevance as a topic of interest for researchers of various disciplines and, among these, occupational health and safety exerts a prominent role [...]

This chapter focuses on the notion of health in relation to translation and gender and sexuality studies. It makes references to the way health has been theorised by a range of contemporary queer feminists in the United States, Europe, Latin America, and China, who were inspired mainly by the feminist initiatives in the 1970s. For queer feminisms, health becomes synonymous with freedom of choice on matters such as one’s own body, affective and sexual relationships, and reproduction. Many queer feminist groups are actively engaged in the production of counter-knowledge on health, i.e. new and peripheral knowledge that opposes the official mainstream one, for two main reasons: first, to subvert the asymmetrical relationship between expert mainstream knowledge and the needs expressed by women and LGBTQ* subjects on these topics; second, to challenge institutional medical narratives, which have marginalised or censored this counter-knowledge. Pivotal in the production of an understanding of health in queer feminist terms is translation, given that it can make up for the lack of specific knowledge in a given cultural context. The translation scenarios analysed in this chapter revolve around taboo topics concerning female sexuality and genitalia, transgender issues and reproductive choices.

This article looks at the role played by emotions and affect in activist translation, that is, translation understood as a tool for political change, by analyzing the Italian queer transfeminist group ideadestroyingmuros. Translation is conceived by this collective as a bodily act, a transformation of oneself in the act of migrating, as a way for, in the words of the collective, ‘redeeming life,’ that is, improving living conditions. This transformation, for ideadestroyingmuros and other queer transfeminist groups, can indeed stem from the creation of more affective, supportive and cooperative conditions of living. The article will draw on the concepts of emotion and affect, as theorised by some scholars who dealt with them. Emotion and affect, with their emphasis on relationality and on the capacity to create action and to be affected by action, can demonstrate how translation impacts on translators, and how sociopolitical studies of translation can benefit from a view of ideological positioning as the outcome of a series of intricate emotional and affective journeys.

This book revolves around the analysis of a corpus of texts by Italian-Canadian writers: Mary Melfi, Nino Ricci and Frank Paci. Before delving into the discussion of the texts, this chapter introduces the main theoretical concepts, which have underpinned the textual analysis, namely translation, narrative and return. Translation is theorised here as a metaphor for return and as a metaphor for writing. Both metaphors originate from studies of diaspora as a term referring to conditions of displacement and to the translation of such displacement. Translation is best represented in this scenario by the use of heterolingualism, which exemplifies the movement back and forth between different points of view and voices, belonging to the Italian and Canadian sphere of consciousness. Since voice and perspective are narrative concepts, it is through theories of narrative that returns are discussed.

This chapter investigates the concept of return in relation to a trilogy of novels by author Nino Ricci (1990, 1993, 1997)—a memoir by author Mary Melfi, Italy Revisited (2009) and a novel by author Frank Paci, Italian Shoes (2002), and their respective translations into Italian. The chapter starts by introducing the phenomenon of Italian-Canadian writing, a body of literature produced in Canada in the last forty years by writers of Italian background, focusing on the question of ethnicity and heterolingualism or code-switching, the switch from a language to another. It then moves into a discussion of the theme of return within this writing and finally analyses the theme of return in Ricci, Paci and Melfi’s texts, and in the discourses that have framed their translations as a return to Italy of the past emigrants.

This chapter examines how narrative theory and translation can be combined, through the notion of written code-switching, the switch from a language into another, into a model of analysis that can be used to examine the notion of return in Italian-Canadian diasporic writing and in its Italian translation. This chapter begins by looking at the meaning of focalisation and voice in classical and poststructuralist narratology, and in narrative theory, arguing that these elements concern the visual and aural point around which our narrative subjectivities are turned into plots that make sense. It then discusses the notion of code-switching, the switch from a language to another, paying specific attention to the fictional and pragmatic aspect of written code-switching and to studies which investigate its translation. The model finally links code-switching to the narratological concepts of focalisation, voice and plot, within the framework of studies of style in translation and narrative theory, demonstrating that in diasporic writing narratives are “translational”, as they are assumed to be founded on translation.

This chapter discusses my efforts at implementing a queer and feminist pedagogy (Fraser and Lamble 2015) within some BA and MA programmes in Translation Studies in various British universities in which I have taught. Such a pedagogy is informed by a socio-constructivist (Kiraly 2000) and political approach to translation training (Tymoczko 2010; Baker and Maier 2011). Both queer and feminist pedagogies foreground the idea of using students’ and teachers’ own experience about oppression as learning materials, and consider knowledge to be socially and collaboratively constructed—similar to what is taught in political approaches to translation training. This chapter analyses classroom activities aimed at integrating a feminist and queer pedagogy in translation training, within the context of the constraints and (im)possibilities provided by the British Neoliberal University. Such pedagogical praxis is informed by the idea of queer desire, understood as a pleasurable and disruptive force capable of igniting the potentialities that students and teachers bring to class.

This chapter discusses the findings of the textual analysis of code-switching, that is the switch from a language to another, in Ricci’s trilogy (1990, 1993, 1997), Paci’s Italian Shoes (2002) and Melfi’s Italy Revisited (2009), in the light of the social narratives of return which surround the Italian translations of these works (Ricci 2004; Paci 2007; Melfi 2009). The analysis confirms how the code-switched items categorised in this body of writing are also commonly found in other diasporic writing, and that code-switching involves linguistic areas which are also likely to be code-switched in oral conversation. Moreover, it confirms how code-switching, by focusing on elements such as origins and sense of guilt, contributes to the construction of narratives of return which are framed in terms of restoration of a sense of wholeness and restitution of loss as a result of the fractures opened up by emigration or as a result of the loss of memory about such emigration.

This chapter discusses examples of code-switching, that is the switch from a language to another, in Nino Ricci’s Lives of The Saints trilogy (1990, 1993, 1997), Paci’s Italian Shoes (2002) and Melfi’s Italy Revisited (2009), and in their Italian translations. The chapter aims to compare how code-switching contributes to narratives of return within these texts, with the way in which it contributes to narratives of return in the paratexts, that is in the book covers, blurbs and book prefaces, and in the reviews of these books. One of the major findings of this analysis, aimed at testing the theoretical assumptions presented in Chapter 3, is the fact that the ideas of return as framed by the paratexts and the reviews of these novels and memoir seem to be strictly connected to the code-switched elements inserted in the texts, a finding that stresses the pivotal role of code-switching as a linguistic and translational tool in the narrative construction of the notion of return.

This article explores how two Italian-Canadian families negotiate the coming out of their sons in the film Mambo italiano, a comedy/ drama released in 2003 and set in Montreal, Canada. The Italian-Canadian protagonist, Angelo, after years of living in the closet, decides to tell his parents he is gay, outing at the same time his Italian-Canadian lover, Nino, and provoking initially strong and vexed reactions in their respective families. Although full of stereotypes and cliches on ethnicity and gender identities, and following closely the so-called coming-out films’ genre, arguably concerned with positive representations of gay coming-out experiences, the film portrays the ironic, creative, and interesting ways in which these Italian-Canadian families negotiate a coming out despite the homophobic prejudices they are imbued with. Moving from studies of family resilience, this article argues that the major strategies used for integrating gayness into the family are drawn from the resources available to (pos...

Drawing on the work of Arjun Appadurai (1996), this article discusses recent translations into Italian of Italian-Canadian writing as part of a wider “landscape”, centred mainly on the idea of return to the homeland. This landscape consists not only of powerful discourses circulating in Italian cultural institutions and guiding the selection and marketing of the translations of this post-migrant literature, but also of discourses employed by de-territorialized ethnoscapes of Italians in Canada. By presenting paratextual and textual examples relating to these translations, published mainly by Cosmo Iannone Editore in the first decade of the twenty-first century, this article shows how the landscapes of return constructed in Italy differ from those constructed by English-Canadian and French-Canadian publishing houses. Landscapes representing a failed attempt to metaphorically return to the ancestral homeland in Italian-Canadian writing are substituted, in Italy, for landscapes of a nostalgic return home of ...

The evil eye or malocchio has appeared in the works of a number of Italian-Canadian writers but for most its role has been limited. In Lives of the Saints, however, the first volume of the trilogy of the same name by Nino Ricci, its role is fundamental to the novel’s narrative construction. The central act of the novel, set in a village in southern Italy in the 1960s, is the snakebite received by the protagonist’s mother, Cristina, while she is engaged in adulterous intercourse. She becomes pregnant as a result of this encounter and is ostracised by the villagers who intepret her condition as the consequence of the evil eye, lu malocchiu. The evil eye becomes a symbol of the pain and violence of the behavioural rules and boundaries imposed on women’s flesh. Ricci, the most successful Italian-Canadian author of his generation, uses the concept of malocchio to unmask the implications of traditional patriotic and nostalgic narratives based on women’s sexuality, and eventually to construct a complex narrative of the Italian-Canadian post-migrant experience.

This study investigated the role of typological relatedness, language of the community, and age, in predicting similarities and differences between English–Italian, Spanish–Italian bilingual children and their monolingual child and adult counterparts in the acceptability of pre- and postverbal object pronouns in [±focus] contexts in Italian and in English. Cross-linguistic influence occurred in [−focus] contexts as a function of typological relatedness and language of the community. English–Italian bilinguals in the UK accepted pragmatically inappropriate postverbal pronouns in [−focus] contexts in Italian twice as often as all the other groups. Cross-linguistic influence was unidirectional from English to Italian as shown by the categorical rejection of preverbal pronouns in [−focus] contexts in English. In [+focus] contexts, in English no significant differences existed between the monolinguals and the bilinguals in the low accuracy with which they chose pragmatically appropriate stressed pronouns. Similarly, the choice of appropriate pronouns in [+focus] contexts in Italian was problematic for monolingual and bilingual children irrespective of the language of the community and of the bilinguals’ other language. Age was a factor only for the Italian children who approached adultlike performance in [+focus] contexts only by the age of 10. These findings point to the need for a multifaceted approach to account for similarities and differences between the linguistic behavior of bilingual and monolingual children.

A number of recent studies have argued that bilingual children's language comprehension and production may be affected by cross-linguistic influence. The overall aim of this study was to investigate whether the ability to judge the grammaticality of a construction in one language is affected by knowledge of the corresponding construction in the other language. We investigated how English–Italian and Spanish–Italian bilingual children and monolingual peers judged the grammaticality of plural NPs in specific and generic contexts in English and in Italian. We also explored whether language of the community, age, and the typological relatedness of the bilinguals’ two languages significantly affected their performance. While performance in English was overall poor, no significant differences existed between the English–Italian bilinguals and the monolinguals. In contrast, we found that knowledge of English affected the bilinguals’ ability to discriminate between grammatical and ungrammatical sentences in Italian. The English–Italian bilinguals were significantly less accurate than both the monolinguals and the Spanish–Italian bilinguals in a task where they simply had to rely on the local definite article cue to reject ungrammatical bare plurals in generic contexts. Language of the community and age also played a significant role in children's accuracy.

This chapter focuses on non- professional interpreting and translation performed by children from migrant backgrounds, between healthcare providers who speak the host country’s language(s), and their own families and/or communities who may lack the necessary proficiency in these language(s). We will first offer a definition of this type of interpreting and translation, called Child Language Brokering (henceforth, CLB) in general (Section 1). We will then review the legal frameworks (Section 2) and the literature on CLB, specifically within the healthcare sector (Section 3). Finally, before reflecting on future directions, we will present some of the findings of our own research on CLB in Italy, with special reference to healthcare (Section 4).

1. Intercultural Communication Audiovisual translation (AVT), as many have noted (see Gambier in this issue) has moved from its focus on the text to a more multimodal, multi-semiotic perspective. Along with this has come the interest in the cultural factor in AVT. However, the research on how to account for cultural difference in AVT has mainly focused on the translation of culture-bound terms, which, as we will see, are just the tip of the iceberg in intercultural communication (ICC). According to Rogers et al. (2002), ICC was first coined by E. T. Hall (1990) in 1959. Hall was working with Native Navaho Indians on a US government land project, and noticed in the negotiations between the government officials and the Navaho, that even though English was the lingua franca, misunderstanding over meaning was creating serious practical problems. What was particularly notable about Hall’s work was his ability to identify the differences as patterns, which are as he stressed, shared “out of awareness” within cultural groups. ICC has grown enormously since then, though Hall himself was little involved in theorising about the discipline. Milton Bennett, an American ICC consultant, one of the founder developers of the discipline, posits that «the intercultural communication approach is that cultures are different in their languages, behaviour patterns, and values» (1998: 3). Much of the work on the cultural in translation is, however, based on monocultural communication. The assumption is often that culture is a superficial difference, that underneath there are universal similarities (Katan 2004: 333-4), that once ethnographic knowledge is made available and the «original context is reactivated alongside the target context» (House 2006: 356; 2009: 12) then communication will in theory be successful. Reddy (1979: 297) labelled this monocultural approach to translation the “conduit” metaphor: once the language is “translated”, then meaning is successfully communicated in the same way as conduits transfer without loss or distortion. However, it is now accepted that meaning is not innate, nor is it simply relayed by language. Instead, language is a cue to what it is that is going on below the tip of the iceberg.

In this paper we will focus on the problems of audiovisual translation regarding texts characterized by the presence of traits and varieties of language with a high level of markedness both on a diatopic and socio-situational level. In this regard, two short films will be analysed, the Portuguese Arena (2009) directed by João Salaviza, and the Brazilian Cine Holiúdy – O Artista Contra o Cabo do Mal (2004) directed by Halder Homes, in their original version and in their version with Italian subtitles.