Tetù, taralli, viscotti regina and Palermitan mostaccioli: food and audiovisual translation in the Inspector Montalbano series

Culture-bound elements affect both standard and regional variations and foster the debate on how to translate such expressions which have a pivotal role in interlingual translation. In Andrea Camilleri’s novels and in their audiovisual translations, food plays such a role: it celebrates victories; it restores mental energies; it depicts the regional boundaries of communication. Somehow, food plays the role of a ‘social ritual’, as for example when Montalbano visits François, buying “tetù, taralli, viscotti regina and Palermitan mostaccioli”. Speaking of food in the Inspector Montalbano series means to ‘taste’ a linguistic alterity which is closely connected to the local culture and territory where the stories take place. Many times, Montalbano’s devotion to food speaks in dialect, providing a regional flavour which will be investigated under the light of what Federici asks about the key role of regionalisms in telling social issues which are strictly intertwined with narrative explicit and implicit needs when he writes “Does giving regionalised voices to characters or localising the news become a way to show the marginal voices and identify political and social issues?” (15). Several studies have attempted to provide an accurate analysis of those strategies adopted by translators to render the complexity of Montalbano’s language, favouring a foreignizing approach or a domesticating one according to their personal point of view, or, it would be better to say, editors’ needs. When dealing with audiovisual translation, several other components have to be considered, as for example restrictions of time and space, or the role played by pictures. In Inspector Montalbano series, it is possible to detect several differences concerning strategies adopted to translate Sicilian dishes, especially adopting a diachronic analysis, as well as a diastratic and a diatopic one. In fact, food related utterances are often subtitled with consistent changes, as for example those due to compression, which occurs frequently, sometimes implying a loss of variation, or a simplification. It occurs for example when Montalbano eats fish: each variety has a specific value for the Inspector, but simplification seems to be in a sort of inversely proportional relation to the pathos of the scene. Montalbano’s Croquettes was aired in 2008. Croquettes was term used to translate the Sicilian Arancini (a variant used in the east side of the island): since an audiovisual text is a multisemiotic system, in which several codes operate to produce meaning, disambiguation of “croquettes” was possible thanks to some pictures of Adelina’s kitchen. On the contrary, in The Hall of Mirrors, aired in 2013, translators used the term “arancini”, due to the fact that Oxford dictionary editors had decided to add this foreign term to the list of common words used in everyday language. In the light of these considerations, this paper will muse on some cases of Sicilian culinary heritage as represented by Camilleri in terms of symbols of ‘social issues’ which deal with his characters; the analysis will, also, bring to light the fundamental role of borrowings, geographical allusions, idiomaticity and humour as particularly challenging features of translating food for the screen.