Constructing Identity Through Multimodal Narrative for the Italian Deaf Community: Cinema and TV

Research is underway to investigate access by the Italian Deaf community to international communication which inevitably involves contact between two very diverse cultural and linguistic identities belonging to Italian Deaf and hard of hearing individuals and the English-speaking world. The term ‘culture’ is something we all recognize in different contexts of usage but is it possible to identify a Deaf culture? This issue is discussed and an attempt is made to uncover to what extent Anglo-American values and cultural identity traits are transferred to /may conflict with those of the Deaf in the context of the visual media. The Deaf live in a visual environment and thus naturally watch films and television that include constant references to Anglo-American realities. They are able to do so exclusively through translation or interpretation by reading subtitles in Italian or watching a sign language interpreter. It is thus intended to investigate socio-political discourses within multimodal corpora which contain specific Anglo-American cultural identity traits and discover to what extent they may or may not be transferred to an Italian Deaf audience. The corpora include: - well-known contemporary British or American feature films on DVD covering different socio-political themes leading to the comparative analysis of transcribed spoken screen scripts of the films in English with the aligned Italian subtitles; - video recorded Italian TV news bulletins recorded over several days, in spoken Italian, together with simultaneous interpretation in Italian Sign Language, related exclusively to Anglo-American news events of socio-political interest. These two text types are predominantly narrative or hybridized narrative constructing stories/reports and perspectives which may embody conflicting views within social formations. Details of the corpora collection, content and research methodologies are reported with indication of the specialized terminology encountered.