Translating the North–South imagological feature in a movie: Bienvenue chez les Ch’tis and its Italian versions

This article uses an imagological perspective to compare the French movie Bienvenue chez les Ch’tis with its Italian adaptations, including the remake Benvenuti al Sud. Since the Italian relocalised version is centred around the North–South opposition of the original French film, this paper first describes the features of the North–South constant in imagology, and subsequently provides an overview of the historical background of the stereotypes about northern France and southern Italy. The analysis of the films focuses in more detail on the film titles, the posters, the trailers as well as the main imagological features used and translated in the different versions. It shows the power of translational discourse in the transfer of ethnotypes, as well as the way in which translation studies and imagology mutually enrich each other.