Food matters: unpalatable issues in AVT

In fast-food menus uniformity and standardization of taste are erasing from food any local meanings and peculiarities, and are promoting a process of food-globalization (Pravettoni 2005). Nonetheless, the food system is still an extraordinary vehicle of self-representation and cultural exchange (Montanari 2004), and for many the most sensitive and important expression of national culture (Newmark 1988).Particular food items are so closely associated with ethnically and culturally differentiated groups, so as to function as ethnic signifiers. A case in point is Food Fight, a short film by Stefan Nadelman which is an abridged history of American-centric warfare, from WWII to present day, told through the foods of the countries in conflict. It thus stands to reason that food makes a good theme for the cinema. Particularly in AVT, given the notorious constraints, “food terms are subject to the widest variety of translation procedures” (Newmark 1988:97).Our study is a corpus-based analysis of the different translation strategies chosen to render food terms, conducted on a comparative, descriptive, non-judgmental procedure, carried out on an English-Italian parallel corpus. The corpus consists of the English audio script of 15 American/English feature films, along with their Italian translation in the form of subtitles and 3 Italian films along with their English subtitled translation. Films were chosen on the basis of their plot connected with food and/or their being dependent on a peculiar socio-cultural context, which made it particularly revealing for our research aims. Predictably enough, the scripts of the chosen films abound in Extralinguistic Culture-bound Reference (Pederson 2011) particularly referring to “material culture” (Newmark 1998: 95). The examples were gathered by analyzing the Italian/English subtitles of the American/Italian films and determining the strategies used in subtitling mainly according to the Gottlieb theoretical framework (1992). The analysis of examples reported allow us to substantially confirm the research hypothesis: “Where texts are governed by cultural mores, predictability can be largely discounted”(Taylor 2006:10). However, by and large in most examples denotative messages get across, bur losses are inevitable; particularly humorous asides disappear.