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Part of
Interconnecting Translation Studies and Imagology
Edited by Luc van Doorslaer, Peter Flynn and Joep Leerssen
[Benjamins Translation Library 119] 2016
► pp. 257–275

Images of Italy?

The words Berlusconi never (officially) said

This chapter discusses some of the interwoven issues concerning translation, imagology, and ideology in the news. Part of a larger project investigating representations of Silvio Berlusconi’s politically incorrect discourse in the British press, the chapter analyses a small but significant corpus of online news texts that focus on the Italian leader’s alleged use of two taboo expressions. The first is “Forza Gnocca” [“Go Pussy”], a suggested new name for his People of Freedom political party (Kington 2011). Berlusconi’s purported soubriquet, ‘Culona inchiavabile’ [unscrewable big arse – Nicoli 2011] for Angela Merkel is the second discursive event examined. Focusing on the reverberations of linguistic taboos in the process of meaning transfer from Italian into English, the chapter suggests that renderings of these unsubstantiated utterances are ideologically slanted, consciously or unconsciously, to support existing news narratives surrounding Berlusconi.

Keywords: Berlusconi, cultural stereotyping, translating taboo, gender, news translation
Article outline
  • Introduction
  • The questions
  • Berlusconi – the literature
  • What’s in an image?
  • You’ve been framed
  • Casting the image
  • Analytical framework
  • Method design and data selection
  • Theoretical premise: Language in social life, translating cultures
  • Merkel
    • The event
    • The analysis
  • “Gnocca”
    • The event
    • Thatcher the Gnocca
    • The analysis
  • “Forza Gnocca”
  • Closing remarks
  • Notes
  • References
Published online: 25 February 2016
DOI logo
https://doi.org/10.1075/btl.119.15fil
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