Cross-cultural/linguistic transfer of legal terminology on film and television to the Italian Deaf Community

This paper brings together disciplines – translation, interpreting and LSP – by discussing research conducted within an Italian National Research Project (PRIN) entitled Identity and Culture in English Domain-specific Discourse, in a particular intercultural/linguistic perspective: transfer of information from a hearing to deaf cultural. Research is centred on the transfer of Anglo-American identity and culture to the Italian deaf community in two corpora of subtitled feature films from English to Italian (translation) and TV news bulletins in Italian interpreted to Italian Sign Language (interpreting). Investigation focussed on two methodologies regarding translation/interpreting of the socio-political discourses found within the two multimodal corpora which contain specific Anglo-American cultural identity traits: comparative analysis of the transcribed spoken screen scripts of three well-known contemporary American feature films in English and the aligned Italian subtitles; comparative analysis of transcribed spoken Italian from video recorded Italian television news bulletins recorded over one month, and the simultaneous interpretation into Italian Sign Language. An interesting aspect which emerged from the analysis of the translation/interpreting of these two genres was the high percentage of LSP they contained . Domain-specific terminology was identified from word counts of the corpora collected.