The role of language in tv shows and its impact on the audience: A linguistic analysis of Game of Thrones

Through the analysis of American TV show Game of Thrones, this dissertation will focus on the linguistic issues concerning the adaptation from books to television, the power of language over the audience, and the creation of two languages, with all the linguistic and cultural implications related to this phenomenon.

La traduzione dei racconti di Pat Mora: muoversi tra due lingue e due culture

This dissertation deals with the translations of seven books for children written by the Chicano author Pat Mora. I started to be interested in the Chicano world, a world suspended between Mexico and the United States, after reading a book by Sandra Cisneros. I decided to deepen my curiosity and for this reason, I discovered a hybrid reality full of history, culture and traditions. In this context, the language used is characterized by a continuous code switching between Spanish and English and I thought it was an interesting phenomenon from the literary and translation point of view. During my research in the Chicano culture, I ran across Pat Mora. Her books for children fascinated me because of their actual themes (the cultural diversity and the defense of identity) and their beautiful illustrations. For this reason, I chose to translate seven of her books because I believe they could be an enrichment for children literature in Italy. The work consists of five chapters. The first one deals with the identity of Chicano people, their history, their literature and their language. In the second chapter, I outline Pat Mora’s profile. I talk about her biography and I analyze her most famous works. In the third chapter, I introduce the seven books for children to be translated and I point out their plots and main themes. In the fourth chapter, I present the translation of the books. The fifth chapter is the translation comment. I deal with the linguistic analysis of the source texts and the analysis of the target texts focusing on the choices made during the translation process.

La traduzione del romanzo per ragazzi Apache - Girl Warrior di Tanya Landman: Un incontro tra storia, genere e culture.

This dissertation deals with the translation into Italian of selected passages from the Young Adult historical novel Apache – Girl Warrior by English author Tanya Landman. The book was chosen after contacting Italian publisher Settenove, dedicated to preventing gender-based violence through children's books and essays. The novel, set in the second half of the Nineteenth Century, tells the story of Siki, a fourteen years old Native American girl who decides to become a warrior in order to avenge her family, killed by the Mexicans. The story also deals with the contact and conflict between Native Americans and white settlers during the so-called Apache Wars. Chapter I deals with Apache's genre; it consists in an overview of the historical novel form and its diffusion, both in Italy and in the English-speaking world. Typical features and themes are also dealt with in this chapter. Chapter II is dedicated to Apache's author. Landman's other works and her mission as a writer are taken into account, as well as the inspirations that led her to writing the novel and the process of research on American history it involved. This chapter also includes a comparison between Tanya Landman's and Louise Erdrich's works. In chapter III, Apache is compared to two well-known novels for children and young adults, The little house on the prairie and Caddie Woodlawn; the aim of this is to demonstrate how widespread misrepresentations about Native Americans are in mainstream literature. Chapter IV analyzes the novel and serves as an introduction to its translation, focusing on its plot, themes, characters and language, while chapter V presents the passages I've chosen to translate; their translation can be found later in the same chapter. In chapter VI, I comment on the choices made during the translation process; translation problems are divided into culture-specific, stylistic, semantic and linguistic.

Child Language Brokering: cause ed effetti della mediazione linguistica e culturale svolta dai bambini immigrati

Il presente elaborato si pone l’obiettivo di mostrare e analizzare il fenomeno sempre più diffuso del Child Language Brokering (CLB). Si tratta di una scelta dettata non solo dall’attualità dell’argomento, tenuto conto dei grandi flussi migratori che hanno caratterizzato di recente lo scenario europeo, ma anche da motivi di carattere personale. Nelle pagine seguenti mi occuperò di descrivere la situazione all’interno della quale questo fenomeno si sviluppa, i motivi per i quali il bambino riveste il ruolo di language broker, in che misura questo lo condiziona a livello emotivo e come cambiano le sue relazioni all’interno della famiglia e con i propri pari. Successivamente analizzerò cosa significa realmente mediare e quali sono le strategie che questi piccoli mediatori adottano per svolgere questa attività. Nell’ultimo capitolo mi soffermerò sull’impatto che tale ruolo può avere sull’identità e sulle conseguenze che comporta il vivere tra due culture.

De-authoring or Authoring?: A plunge into the question of authorship and language in J.M. Coetzee's Foe

J. M. Coetzee's Foe is not only a post-colonial novel, but it is also a re-writing of a classic, and its main themes are language, authorship, power and identity. Moreover, Foe is narrated by a woman, while written by a male, Nobel prize winning South African author. The aim of my tesina is to focus on the question of authorship and the role of language in Foe. Without any claim to be exhaustive, in the first section I will examine some selected extracts of Coetzee's book, in order to provide an analysis of the novel. These quotations will mainly be its metalinguistic parts and will be analysed in the “theory” sections of my work, relying on literary theory and on previous works on the novel. Among others, I will cover themes such as the relationship between speech and writing, the connection between writing, history, and memory, the role of silence and alternative ways of communicating and the relationship between literary authority and truth. These arguments will be the foundation for my second section, in which I will attempt to shed a light on the importance of the novel from a linguistic point of view, but always keeping an eye on the implication that this has on authorship. While it is true that it is less politically-permeated than Coetzee's previous works, Foe is above all a “journey of discovery” in the world of language and authorship. In fact, it becomes a warning for any person immersed in the ocean of language since, while everyone naturally tends to trust speech and writing as the only medium through which one can get closer to the truth, authority never is a synonym of reliability, and language is a system of communication behind which structures of power, misconceptions, lies, and treacherous tides easily hide.

Mocku for change: an explorative study on the use of “mockumentary” as a new language for climate change education

In the ‘society of acceleration and uncertainty’ (Rosa, 2013), the young are struggling to interpret our complex and fast-changing world. The entity and the velocity of changes are so enormous that we need new narratives or languages to conceptualise them. Among those changes “Climate Change” is placed in a particular difficult position. As the writer A. Ghosh said: “The current climate crisis is also a crisis of culture, and thus of the imagination”. In fact, in today’s literature and cinema a strong dichotomy exists between fictional and non-fictional works, but none of those extremities seems suitable to picture an “adequate representation” of climate change issues, particularly those that are related to future. The main goal of my study, carried out within FEDORA EU project, was to understand to what extent the hybrid film form called “mockumentary” (a language that adopts the aesthetics of factual production to give an illusion of truth to invented stories) could inspire and help students in overcoming the mentioned dichotomy, working as a tool to foster the development of argumentative and imaginative skills needed to picture “immaginary yet realistic” climate change scenarios.