Culture and Media

My aim in this chapter is to suggest how postcolonial theory is relevant to the interpretation and study of contemporary ethnic minority media cultures and to demonstrate how they relate to the 'metropolitan centre' of Britain. I intend to do this by tracing a 'cognitive map' of postcolonial perspectives and suggesting how they could contribute to media studies.

This chapter analyses the coverage of the 2016 EU referendum in the Italian press and a key broadcast political talk show, taking as its focus the changed context of the Italian political landscape with the rise of populist anti-European political movements from the Northern League (Lega Nord) through the various incarnations of Berlusconi’s parties to the more recent political formation of the Five Star Movement, which has reduced the Italian people’s traditional support of the European Union. In Italy, as has been the case in other European countries, the press and media aligned to progressive parties of the left and centre-left camp predominantly voiced their support for the Remain campaign, while their counterparts on the right and the centre right-parties and coalitions supported the Brexit campaign.

I have to confess that I have ambivalent feelings about Karen Ross and Carolyn Byerly's Women and Media: International Perspectives. As a university instructor who has taught an undergraduate media and gender course for several years, I find many of the articles thoughtful, engaging, and relevant. Particularly useful for the careful articulation of male hegemony in newsrooms and the effects of such hegemony on news content, this edited collection has much to recommend it. But as a scholar interested in the role of feminist theory in the development of media and communication studies, I find that the book does not sufficiently expand the debate beyond what Carolyn Byerly herself refers to as "the paradigm of misogynist media" (p. 112). Since the rise of second-wave feminism in the 1960s and 1970s, "liberal" feminist critiques of the media have tended to revolve around three central themes: (1) women's under-representation in the media; (2) the media's stereotypical portrayals of women; and (3) women's underemployment in media industries, especially in key decision-making positions. The essays in this collection each address these various concerns within a political economic perspective. Focusing specifically on male dominance and masculine hegemony in the media, these feminist scholars are concerned to uncover the means by which systemic sexism and discrimination take on the appearance of media "common sense." Women and Media: International Perspectives intervenes in this analytical and political terrain with an eye to reflecting the "dynamism" of contemporary research on women and media. A legitimate question arising out of this book is how well does this collection live up to this goal? The answer: Not as well as I had hoped. The individual contributions are well-written and serve to illustrate not only the media's sins against women, but also how women and feminists have transformed some of the media's representational practices. However, the collection as a whole requires a deeper grounding in the historical and theoretical terrain that has given rise to such scholarship. In their very brief introduction to the book, Ross and Byerly attempt to provide the reader with a snapshot of the book's intellectual and theoretical roots.

Italy is one of the core founding members countries of the European Economic Community (EEC), along with Belgium, France, Luxembourg, the Netherlands and the then West Germany; and, for most of its post-Second World War history, has been a strong supporter of the European unification project. In the last two decades, however, with the rise of new political formations such as the Lega Nord, the entrance into the political arena of Silvio Berlusconi, and more recently with the establishment of the Movimento 5 Stelle (Five Stars Movement), henceforth M5S, there has been a marked change and anti-European sentiments have become more widespread in the political culture as a whole. This in turn has affected media coverage of European Union (EU) affairs and has steered the views of the Italian public towards a more negative reading of the European unification project.

Anthropological and ethnographic cultural institutions generally hold large collections of audiovisual material connected with several European nations' colonial past. Many of these institutions are now aware of the ethical challenge they are faced with and are currently attempting to address this ambiguous and often violent colonial past. In the case of anthropological photographs and films, the process of decolonisation has been particularly complicated, as it is also bound up with the glowing reputation of many of the founders of the discipline of anthropology itself. Within the context of the European-wide project 'Polyvocal Interpretation of Contested Colonial Heritage (PICCH), this research proposes a framework for decolonising anthropological films held in digital archives and obtained within colonial relationships. The chapter illustrates a re-usable process of re-appropriation and reinterpretation by analysing characteristics and patterns from a sample of the anthropological films digitised in the collection of the Pitt Rivers Museum in Oxford, UK.

Starting with the translation and publication of the Nobel Laureate Odysseas Elytis’s magnum opus ‘The Axion Esti’ in 1974 and spanning nearly 30 years of continuous presence of Modern Greek poetry in English, this overview focuses on the complementary texts accompanying the translated work of several major Greek poets of the 20th century.
From the ideologically tinged introduction to the ‘Axion Esti’, translated and published towards the end of the Colonels’ Junta in Greece, to the translator Kimon Friar’s overview of more than 100 years of Greek poetry, with his addition of a section entitled ‘Historical Background’ in his introduction in 1982, to the 1995 publication of the second Nobel Laureate George Seferis’s Complete Works and the addition of an anthologized volume by academic and translator David Ricks in 2003; a shift in the translators’ purpose and approach is noticeable, a shift which also affects their translating strategies. Whereas the earlier paratexts in this overview seem to advocate certain aspects of the Greek culture through a better understanding of its literary heritage and its crowning poetic achievements, in the later works discussed, the focus is less on the historical and political context, and more on an attempt to position Greek poets within a European modernist tradition, along with E. Pound, T. S. Eliot, P. Eluard, Louis Aragon.
The study of these paratexts, which comprise of introductory notes, prefaces, acknowledgements, commentaries, footnotes and suggestions for further reading, within the socio-political context they were created, offers us indispensable insight into the translators’ mindset; the translators’ goals and objectives during the translation process, their general attitude towards the source text, the source culture and certainly the receptor audience towards which these paratexts were targeted may also be observed.

The German occupation of Greece is a particularly obscure and emotion-ridden period in Greek history, one that has left indelible marks still recognizable more than half a century later. An eminently sensitive issue, one that reaches the status of taboo in today’s political and historical discussions, is that of the people who collaborated with the occupier either willingly or unwillingly. The handful of individuals who were familiar with the German language at the time was used as interpreters, often introduced by the local Greek authorities to the German officials in order to facilitate communication and reduce casualties. Their ambivalent status and their close position to the decision-makers of the time, their involvement to the practice of power singles them out as significant eye and ear witnesses who can testify to the benefit of history and the historiography of translation. This paper examines one such written historical account about two siblings, Argyris Fortounas and his sister Dionysia Fortouna, who acted as interpreters from 1941-44. It discusses their initial involvement with the German administrators at their home in Aegina, the particular difficulties they faced and lays out their thoughts and attitudes towards the times, the circumstances and what they were called to do. The paper also discusses the response of the locals to the siblings at the time and concludes with a brief summary of the contemporary reception of the book and its author.

The research object of this study is the symbolic capital of poetry translators and how it shapes and is being shaped by the current practices and self-descriptions of translators of Modern Greek poetry into English. A number of case studies indicate that people who translate poetry come from a variety of backgrounds, including those of a poet and an academic, which often do not include any formal translation training (Hofstadter 1997; Waldinger 2003; Bullock 2011; Isaxanli 2014). It also appears to be common that translators of poetry have a number of complementary roles, with that of 'poetry translator' not always central. The study draws on data consisting of Modern Greek into English poetry translators' responses to a survey, of paratexts created by Modern Greek into English translators and of ten interviews. Cultural and educational capitals are examined in their institutionalized, objectified and embodied form as bearers of symbolic capital. Three overlapping categories are explored: the translators' connection to poetry and the source culture, translator education and translator self-description. The translators' "extratextual visibility" (Koskinen 2000 as cited in Chesterman 2018: 446) is also analyzed as it forms part of the translators' embodied cultural and symbolic capital. This empirical exploration offers insights into the variety of attitudes and approaches to poetry translation; the emerging patterns map out profiles of a group of contemporary poetry translators, investigate the realities of the craft and re-position poetry translation practitioners with respect to other translation professionals.

This paper reports on the findings of a survey designed to investigate the emotions experienced by subtitlers who work on sensitive audiovisual material and whether these emotions affect their subtitling performance. For the purposes of this paper, the term sensitive audiovisual material concerns audiovisual texts which deal with controversial and emotive topics, such as the abuse of people and/or animals, war, torture, and death, among others. The concept of performance is taken to broadly refer to the subtitling process and does not cover metrics of quality assurance. The paper focuses on two aspects of the study: (1) the emotions that were most commonly reported to be experienced by the subtitlers, along with the aspects of the audiovisual text that seem to trigger them, and (2) the ways in which this emotional impact affects the subtitlers' performance. Discussion of the latter aspect draws on examples provided by the subtitlers that illustrate how their subtitling process changes due to the experienced emotional impact. The paper concludes by putting forward training suggestions for more effective handling of emotional impact, which may provide the platform for further research on this topic.

The object of this paper is to engage in the ongoing discussion within Translation/Translator Studies regarding how the translator’s gender affects and is affected by the profession and the field of translation (Schaeffner 2013, Al-Jarf 1999, Bacardi and Godayol 2014). Drawing on both primary and secondary data, the paper will focus on discussing theorisations regarding the implications and repercussions of translation as a potentially gendered profession for its own agents.
Multiple studies focusing on translators have demonstrated how today’s professional realities are complicated by the constant interplay between the translator’s historically subordinate position to the writer and the fact that most translators are women (Sela-Sheffy 2008, Dam and Korning Zethsen 2014, Mohammadi 2014, Heino 2017). The implications of this dual reality involve translation often being considered an ill-defined support role performed within institutions and cultures which, often unwittingly, adopt exclusionary practices towards their members and by doing so perpetuate and legitimise inequalities.
This paper draws on secondary data gathered from studies conducted in Translation research as well as data from two empirical studies which I designed and co-conducted, the first one with poetry translators (Georgiou 2018) and the second with subtitlers (Perdikaki and Georgiou 2020). The focus is on the number of women translators reported in these studies, their translation specialisms and the reasons they work as translators. This data will then be used to examine the repercussions for these female practitioners and their effects on the profession. Issues as varied as translator visibility, with its consequent implications regarding employability, gatekeeping the profession and obtaining qualifications and credentials, as well as work-life balance and the ergonomics of the translation workspace will be discussed.

This paper discusses the emotions experienced by subtitlers who subtitle sensitive audiovisual material. "Sensitive audiovisual material" refers to audiovisual texts which deal with controversial and emotive topics, such as abuse, war, torture. This topic has remained under-researched in subtitling, despite having been sporadically explored in other fields of translation (Hubscher-Davidson, 2017; Rojo and Ramos Caro, 2016; Tabakowska, 2016). The data presented in this paper expand upon and complement the findings discussed in Perdikaki and Georgiou (2020) based on an online survey completed by 170 subtitlers. For the current paper, the data discussed come from an online focus group with three professional subtitlers and face-to-face interviews with one freelance subtitler as well as a team interview with two in-house quality control editors. Having confirmed in our previous study that many subtitlers are affected by the sensitive AV material they subtitle, this paper aims at a more nuanced exploration of how subtitlers regulate emotions elicited on-the-job, offering specific examples as well as emotion management techniques. Finally, the perspective of emotional responsiveness, depending on socioeconomic contexts as well as the linguistic arsenal of the subtitler, is briefly discussed.

Kimon Friar’s (1911-1993) voluminous translation work of Modern Greek literature in English has been lauded by fellow translators (Keeley 2000), poets and reviewers alike. The annual Kimon Friar lectures, delivering talks on Greek literature and translation, have become a testament to his extensive contribution, adding credence to his life-long occupation as literary translator (1949-1993). And yet, his multifaceted, and pivotal, role in selecting, translating, editing, circulating, and championing the authors and works he translated is far more complex and deems further exploration. Friar was not only a prolific translator but also an outspoken proponent of the rights of literary translators, particularly regarding royalties and the translator’s moral right for attribution. At the same time, Friar, in conjunction with some of the Greek poets he translated, performed a gatekeeping, regulatory role regarding the authors and works selected for English translation. Finally, Friar was vocal in his correspondence with editors and publishers regarding other potential translators of Modern Greek into English, which he did not deem as good practitioners. This case study draws data from Friar’s correspondence, located at Princeton University Rare Books and Special Collections, which offers key insights into the motives and rationale behind some of Friar’s attitudes and decisions. As a result, the motives behind the selection, production, circulation, and promotion of translated Modern Greek poetry are exposed. The study provides evidence of the potential difference a single translator may make, particularly when translating a literature of lesser diffusion into a more dominant language. The paper also proposes an expanded definition of the translator/gatekeeper.