Liminalità e interpretazione: sconfinamenti tra posizioni interazionali e piani comunicativi

The study aims to investigate whether the media interpreter’s professional profile, with its high degree of autonomous agency and empathic involvement, also characterizes interpreting practice in the field of international film festivals. the analysis is conducted on a set of real-life interactional data – transcribed audio- and video-clips – from the 47th edition of the giffoni film festival, and draws upon the interplay between different theoretical constructs; namely, the concepts of role, discourse and positioning (davies, harré 1990; harré, van Langenhove 1999) as combined by henriksen (1998), and the notion of audience design (bell 1984; 1991) and interaction levels as applied to interpreter-mediated interaction by merlini (2017). account is taken of the impact of the following contextual factors: both the jury and the audience of the giffoni film festival are entirely made up of children and teenagers; and the majority of events are streamed live. findings reveal that the interpreter tends not to take autonomous initiatives, and steps into non-normative positions only if instructed or authorized to do so by primary participants. in the specific context under study, the interpreter’s role can thus be described as a liminal one, displaying the imprecise and unsettled contours of transitoriness.