Identity issues in audiovisual translation across the deaf/hearing cultural divide

This paper reports research conducted in a national research project (PRIN prot. 2005109911) in relation to profoundly deaf and hard-of-hearing Italian individuals’ access to international com-munication (in this case through audiovisual translation) and illustrates some examples of how features of culture and identity are at work at the interface between the Italian Deaf and English-speaking worlds: the deaf/hearing divide. A multimodal corpus of three well-known American feature films was investigated covering themes of socio-political nature. A comparative analysis was undertaken of the transcribed screen dialogues in English and the aligned transcription of the Italian subtitles, this enabled the author to map out narrative and reporting strategies to: identify examples of transfer of American identity and culture to the Italian Deaf; or uncover any rejection of Anglocentric identity; find adaptations to Deaf identity and cultural norms in translation; reveal any instances of culture clash across the deaf/hearing divide and thus discern to what extent Deaf cultural identity is respected or distorted in the translation process.