The course aims at providing students with such linguistic and mediating tools as subtitling and conference interpreting through which it is possible to foster international cooperation. As fields of professional practice and research in intercultural and cross-cultural communication, subtitling and conference interpreting are able to develop the students’ linguistic competence and capacity in today’s globalized world.
As a particular form of audiovisual modality, subtitling appears to be an intermodal kind of language rendering intra-linguistic and extra-linguistic cultural elements from one culture into another. In particular, subtitling may be considered a specific type of intra- and interlingual discourse presenting a series of lexical, syntactical and typographical characteristics which will be closely investigated. The linguistic aspects of subtitling as well as the so-called text reduction shifts will also be treated in order to demonstrate how the fusions of cultures produce hybrid cultural artefacts, combining source and target texts.
Likewise, conference interpreting, whose aim is to help individuals and communities to acquire a fuller knowledge and a deeper understanding of one another, will be introduced as a form of linguistic and cultural mediation in such a multilingual market as the European Union. The traditional mode of interpreting i.e. consecutive interpreting will be introduced along with Rozan’s seven basic principles of note-taking in order to develop the students’ mediating skills.
The course will also be devoted to teach such a topic as “Business English, corpora and translation” by exposing students to the typical sample texts and contexts of Business English used as a Lingua Franca in many areas of the world. After practicing such business writing skills as rephrasing, gap filling and text writing, students will be able to edit business writing in terms of sentence linking, structure and length. With the aid of monolingual and bilingual specialised comparable corpora students will be able to translate the main business documents correspondence from English into Italian and from Italian into English.