Dialogue Interpreting between Cinema and Digital Media: the Giffoni Film Festival as a Case Study

The digital turn has changed every aspect of our lives, including the media ecosystem, which is today dominated by new digital media (Jensen 2021), and interpreting services. This doctoral thesis analyses whether and how a new medium like web-streaming via YouTube, as well as distance interpreting, have an impact on dialogue film festival interpreting (FFI) services (Merlini 2017)–in terms of audience design, interpreters’ agency, and visibility on screen – and on their reception by potential users. A mixed methods design is adopted. The qualitative strand presents the analysis of a multimodal corpus of authentic interpreting practices IT<>EN performed during the latest editions of the Giffoni Film Festival (2017-2020), an important Italy-based international film festival, which addresses an audience made up entirely of young people. Some of its events are live-streamed and are thus open to a remote audience; in 2020, because of the Covid-19 pandemic, it used distance interpreting as well. Therefore, this corpus compares onsite streamed events, distance streamed events and onsite non-streamed events. The analysis focuses on audience design (Bell 1984, 1991), footing (Goffman 1981; Wadensö 1998), positioning (Davies and Harré 1990)—even in spatial terms (Pokorn 2015)—and ethics of entertainment (Katan and Straniero Sergio 2001). Subsequently, the quantitative strand is composed of two questionnaires, which analyse (1) expectations about online audiovisual content and streamed interpreting performances; and (2) the actual reception of authentic clips taken from the corpus. The latter focuses specifically on audience design and visibility on screen: five excerpts deal with appropriateness (Viezzi 1996) strategies of cinema-related terms; and five clips show an increasing visibility on screen of interpreters’ gestures. The corpus-based analysis shows that both the live-streaming and the remoteness make the under-investigated setting of FFI different from traditional TV interpreting (Straniero Sergio 2007). The Giffoni dialogue interpreters address more the flesh-and-blood jurors rather than the streaming users; the latter becoming more involved in remote scenarios. Some footings and positionings are peculiar to these online settings, and the ethics of entertainment is less present and rarely initiated by interpreters. Moreover, generally speaking interpreters resemble more simultaneous rather than consecutive ones since they are usually invisible on screen; however, they become more visible in remote encounters. The analysis of expectations shows that both audience design and visibility on screen are not considered to be important. On the contrary, after reading/watching the excerpts most of the respondents (Italian young people) positively value the strategies interpreters use to adjust their terms to a large audience; and they argue that interpreters are to be visible on screen, both to highlight their professional status and to strengthen the intelligibility of interactions. These data may be also used for didactic purposes. A (socio-)constructivist pedagogic model shows how the multimodal contents available on YouTube can be used to educate dialogue interpreters: for instance, through a CARM-like (Niemants and Stokoe 2017) approach, it may be possible to train interpreters both in a similar media-related context, and in a very different situation such as the healthcare setting.