Transfer and Construction of Identity and Culture in Audiovisual Feature Film Translation for the Italian Deaf Community

Access by the European Deaf community to international communication through English is ob-tained through a variety of direct or indirect channels which inevitably involve contact between very diverse cultural and linguistic identities and realities. Audiovisual translation of films of An-glo-American origin is one such means of access. Research is underway to investigate to what ex-tent Anglo-American values and cultural identity traits are transferred to or may conflict with those of the Italian Deaf and hard of hearing in the context of the visual media through subtitles in Italian. Attention has been focussed in particular on the construction of identity in socio-political discourses within a multimodal corpus of well-known contemporary American feature films. De-tails of research methodologies are reported with indication of the specialized culture-bound socio-political terminology encountered and translation strategies employed.