ELF Reformulations of Italian ‘Lingua Franca’ Uses in the Subtitling of the Migration Movie Lamerica

This paper enquires into the scripted ELF variation adopted in the English subtitling of Lamerica (Gianni Amelio, 1994). The target script reformulates the original interactions through Lingua-franca Italian by means of hybridization processes between spoken Italian lingua franca uses and written ELF rendering that are seen as enabling/failing to realize the complex unequal encounters in contexts of specialized (legal-bureaucratic) communication between low-status Albanians and high-status Italians. The analysis of the spoken interactions rendered into ELF subtitling involves three different, yet complementary dimensions of analysis: the register dimension in the perspective of Halliday’s (1978) functional approach and of van Dijk’s (1980) processes of deletion, construction and generalization in rendering the original social interactions into ELF subtitling, respecting the technical limits and facilitating accessibility and acceptability of culture-bound concepts either between the participants in the interaction and in the international audience of the subtitled movie; the phonopragmatic dimension (Sperti, 2014) of the spoken interactions to explore the socio-pragmatic processes accounting for illocutionary and perlocutionary implications (Searle, 1983), and the rendering of such dimensions characterizing the cross-cultural unequal encounters (in terms of intonational and prosodic variations, emotional and attitudinal conveyance, paralinguistic and visual information) into equivalent written forms of ELF; and the functional dimension involving the standard and scripted ELF variations used in the subtitles, analysed through the application of a causal model of translation (Chesterman, 2000; Bogucki, 2011), enquiring into the cognitive and pragmatic features of the translator’s retextualizations, characterised by relevant lexical and syntactic choices in the attempt to render the participants’ status asymmetries. ELF in this case may thus represent a new hybrid mode of spoken lingua franca rendered into written forms in situations of difficult intercultural communication due to power/status asymmetries between the participants.