Introduction: New Perspectives in Dialect and Multimedia Translation

Dialects have always been considered a lesser version of a standard language or received pronunciation. As Halas (in this issue) rightly observes: ‘[s]tandard variety is associated with higher prestige, whereas dialectal varieties are regarded as either geographically or socially peripheral. Speakers of the standard language variety tend to treat people from remote regions or the lowest stratum of society with utter disdain’. However, the domestic and international movement of people has brought non-standard linguistic realisations to the fore. In today’s globalised world, is it increasingly common to find younger generations with a bicultural (or even multicultural) background and they use code-switching and code-mixing to express and assert their identity (Monti 2016: 69). The phenomena resulting from language contact have always been a part of literary texts, but multimodal productions and the present hyper-reality make them even more evident.