The underrepresentation of ethnic and linguistic minorities, as well as their stereotyped images, are intrinsic to US society, which seems to want them to disappear in order to survive (Macedo 2013). These minorities are often absent from the screens, and when they appear, they are transformed into stereotypes and used as diegetic devices that the public is able to recognise. Even when the films are produced by minorities, they often end up reinforcing these stereotypes while trying to explain or confute them, ultimately surrendering to their social marginality. Indeed, these representations emerge from policies aiming to delete ethnic difference by stigmatising linguistic (Lippi-Green 1997) or social ones (Bender 2003). The power of cinema lays in its ability to shape memory and reality, actively contributing to social and individual narrations (Fluck 2003). In this sense, translation also plays a crucial role in re-presenting minority images to the target audience (van Doorslaer et al. 2016). The aim of this article is to tackle the issue of minority translation as a way to ensure them access to a broader public, in order to present the latter with their own voice and language. More specifically, this article explores the representativity issue as a matter of access by providing answer to the question: what does access mean for a discriminated minority?

This essay focuses on Inga Simpson’s Understory: A Life with Trees (2017) through which Australian flora and fauna become a powerful expression of her ecological activism and bioregional awareness. This will be analyzed by using Riane Eisler’s biocultural partnership-domination paradigm to highlight the relationship between Australian culture and its natural environment, in particular the threatening impact of human beings and climate change. Simpson’s interest in the ‘cognitive’ functions of plants (recognitions, learning mechanisms and remembrance) will also show significant analogies with Monica Gagliano and Stefano Mancuso’s studies.

With the aim of delving deeper into a genre of oral literature, the proverbs, this paper contains the study of the Spanish proverb Aunque la mona se vista de seda, mona se queda (the correspondence to You can't make a silk purse out of a sow’s ear ) from a paremiological perspective. After analysing the formal features of a proverb, its key idea is specified and its meaning is explained, to then find out what variants exist in lexicographical, paremiographical and literary sources, without forgetting the variants provided by oral sources. Afterwards, the semantic relations that this proverb establishes with other proverbs are dealt with, not only in terms of synonymy, but also in terms of antonymy and hyponymy. Finally, the identification of correspondences with paremias from other languages will allow us to have a better knowledge of the life of this proverb and to reach results of interest for the comparative study with other proverbs. Thus, this paper provides a method for analysing proverbs based on research conducted on the complex nature of proverbs.

This contribution contains some reflections on two accessible translating modalities, subtitles for the deaf and hard-of-hearing and audio description. It aims to reflect on some open challenges by commenting on examples drawn from The Kings’ Speech (2010) and The Two Popes (2019). More specifically, on the one hand it deals with the difficulties of conveying information related to the acoustic code, by means of the texture and nuances of the voice, paralinguistic traits and background music. On the other it discusses how to transpose meaning from the visual code for a visually impaired audience, focusing especially on information connected with compositional and editing strategies. Finally, it briefly hints at accommodating the translation of multiple languages within audio description.

The chapter focuses on a new ideological formulation introduced in 2018 in the Constitution of the People’s Republic of China. The contribution aims at studying the discursive strategy in which the item is embedded, and through which it is promoted, by analysing Chinese political discourse in a diachronic perspective between 2013 and 2019. Using a selection parameter of intertextuality, the author has compiled a corpus of texts (in the Chinese language) through which this multifaceted discursive strategy is constructed. Drawing on the discourse-historical approach (Reisigl, Wodak 2009, p. 89; Wodak 2001, pp. 65-66) in a critical discourse analysis perspective, the paper will show how the discursive strategy performs a synergic action to disseminate the new ideology formulation by addressing two sub-topics, and, in parallel, how the texts intentionally promote two main macro-topics of Chinese political discourse.

The paper aims at proposing a theoretical reflection on the concept of (il)literacy in Africa. The theoretical framework is based on the analysis of literacy related to educational linguistics according to De Mauro’s studies. Before analyzing the issue of (il)literacy in Africa, the contribution tackles the main sociolinguistic features of this continent. The illiteracy data illustrated in the paper are taken from UNESCO and United Nations sources. The analysis of concept and effects of (il)literacy in Africa is crucial to separately interpret cultural and linguistic deprivation. Actually, if on the one hand the contribution considers illiteracy as a barrier that prevents the achievement of many educational goals in Africa, on the other it prompts to create conditions so that linguistic precarity could become a means capable of leading to linguistic creativity. The idea is therefore to introduce an inclusive teaching oriented to creative and original language education models capable of valorizing all the semiotic resources of learners.

The functional alphabetical competence and the competence in the matter of citizenship are closely interconnected in the training of the young person: their close functional link is well expressed and well-argued by the Recommendations of the Council of the European Union (in particular from that of 2018) within the general framework of key competences for learning, but in reality it occupies a strand of western thought that goes back so far as to be considered traditional, and takes up ideas and proposals advanced in the last half century mainly by Tullio De Mauro, through the principles of democratic linguistic education. The current cultural climate brings to the fore the link between language and citizenship and outlines a framework of educational obligations which the school cannot escape. But an examination of the limits and difficulties of the Italian school leads to downsizing the most advanced objectives, while aiming to respect the basic objectives indicated by the Council of the European Union. In conclusion, we propose a Decalogue of operational choices that take into account both the essential objectives that cannot be renounced and the current difficulties of the Italian school.

Multimodal resources and digital multimedia technologies have been modifying and remodelling social practices in any field over the last decades. In business communication, histories of business, corporate vision and mission are today instantiated by the ‘About Us’ webpage, a sort of multimodal self-portrait or short autobiography created by the company itself. From a discursive perspective, this webpage typology has always been disregarded if compared with the crucial role played by the homepage that, according to the Usability guidelines, is to present the company, its business and market value. Only recently, web marketers have focused on the strategic function the undervalued ‘About Us’ page fulfils. It has revealed itself to be a goal-oriented sales page which focuses on highlighting the most relevant credentials of a company, its brand, and on making a strong impression on potential customers. Its aim is to remodel practices of Self presentation into practices of Self branding and this process takes place thanks to the co-deployment of different semiotic resources which, in turn, make use of different digital media technologies. This contribution will show how the specialized discourses of marketing and branding are translated, or rather transducted, into multimodal artefacts, the corporate ‘About Us’ pages, and how persuasive discursive strategies are embedded in a well-defined digital text pattern. Through the analysis of a small sample of corporate ‘About Us’ pages, we will demonstrate that these pages are the loci where business reputation and corporate identity can be constructed more effectively.

The use of astronomy discourse in the form of written and web/audiovisual texts has been gaining ground in undergraduate courses of specialized translation. These materials have been used at the University of Leon for the last four years during the last semester of the degree Filologia Moderna: Ingles , as part of the course Traduccion ingles -espanol II , basically geared towards awareness raising of translation problems and solutions available. The aim of this paper is twofold: a) to show the main differences between the language of astronomy in different genres (Stolze 2009; Byrne 2012; Tessuto, Bait 2017) in English and in audiovisual texts (Diaz Cintas, Remael 2007; Chaume 2012) in English and Spanish and b) to show which linguistic areas are more problematic for undergraduate students, e.g. types of technical dialects, nominalization chains, metaphoric language, among others (Rabadan 1991; Shuttleworth 2014). We will use two small comparable subcorpora of written research articles and popular science, and an audiovisual corpus of popular science in order to identify a) similarities and differences at different levels and b) a hierarchy of relevance. Our taxonomy will include linguistic, cultural, genre-based, and semiotic problems and their linguistic manifestations. We will also use an En-Es parallel corpus (Gutierrez Lanza 2011) which will include the originals mentioned above and the translations made by undergraduate students during this period. They will be compared with a “standard” target text in order to identify which features are more problematic in English-Spanish transfer. The results will be collated both statistically and qualitatively so as to produce a tagset of errors to be applied to learners’ corpora. The procedure is replicable for other domains, genres, and language pairs. These corpus-based data En-Es will be used to produce language pair focused training materials (Lopez-Rodriguez, Tercedor-Sanchez 2008; Rabadan 2010).