Abstract

This paper explores the influence of the media turn on the dynamics of interpreter-mediated dialogic interactions in the context of the Giffoni Film Festival, a unique and well-known international film festival held every summer in southern Italy. Its theoretical framework brings together the two seminal concepts of ‘footing’ and ‘positioning’, by looking at utterance-level alignments within sequence-level discursive and spatial positions. The discussion pursues a twofold aim: to devise a descriptive typology of interactionally constructed interpreter positions through a qualitative analysis of representative sequences of YouTube live streamed encounters with world-famous cinema stars; and to determine whether and how the presence of live streaming impacts participants’ behaviours. To this end, the types identified in the analyses are compared with non-live streamed interpreted Q&A sessions with members of the film crews collected in the same setting. Since film festival interpreting is here subsumed under the broader category of media interpreting, the streamed data are also discussed against the backdrop of Francesco Straniero Sergio’s pioneering investigation of TV interpreting practices. Live streaming was found to have significant repercussions on physical and interactional positioning in that it limits the agency of both the festival host and the interpreter by imposing a rigid routine on the event; interpreters appear to adjust to the requirements of the new media context not so much out of lack of interactional power – a power which they apparently feel freer to exert in non-streamed events – but because they prioritise the success of the show over their own visibility; differently from TV entertainment, not only are the guests more interactionally dominant than the hosts, but the needs of the remote audience of streaming users are less catered for than those of the flesh-and-blood jurors sitting in the cinema theatre, despite the structural accommodation to the new medium.

Keywords: film festival interpreting, footing, media interpreting, new media, positioning, live streaming, TV interpreting

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