Food and Translation in Montalbano

Food is more than just a means of nourishment; it reflects the way human beings are influenced by the geographical space they inhabit. Diasporas and more general movements of people across time and space have allowed for the encounter and exchange of different culinary traditions. This has happened orally at first, and subsequently in written form. However, it is the invention of television and the Internet that has taken the sharing of culinary experiences to an entirely new level. Countless TV programmes revolve around food preparation and recipes. Nonetheless, food is not only the main theme of factual entertainment shows, but can also become an essential part of TV dramas and movies due to its ability to convey meaning though its culture-specificity. An excellent example of this is the Italian TV series Inspector Montalbano, which has been adapted from Andrea Camilleri’s many short stories and novels. Since the subtitled versions of the series have been successfully marketed at the international level, it is interesting to investigate how food, one of its topoi, has been dealt with in both British English (TT1) and American English (TT2) subtitled versions. The comparative analysis of these three datasets shows that Montalbano’s (and other characters’) attitudes to food and Italian-Sicilian traditional cuisine are expressed differently in the British and American versions. While the former tends to be more source-oriented in its attempt to convey the peculiarities of Italian and Sicilian food, the latter appears generally more target-oriented. Most importantly, when the American version does retain the Italian and Sicilian culinary terms, they are not always transferred as accurately as could be hoped for. Possible reasons for this may be that it targets an audience that may be mostly made up of Italian-Americans and/or people with some working knowledge of Italian. This study confirms the need for extensive reception studies on audiovisual texts that use the same language but address different cultures.