The Multimodal Rendering of “Otherness” in the Humorous Discourse of Image-macro Memes

This paper illustrates the results of the latest stage of a research project about the use of memes for pedagogic purposes in university classrooms. In the course of a workshop that was held from March to May 2022, seventeen post-graduate students from the University of Salento were tasked with the reformulation of selected forms of visual entertainment containing humorous discourse based on disparaging representations of someone’s otherness. The objective of the workshop was to enquire into the potential benefits of memes at the time of moving the essence of translation process closer to an audience of nonexperts. In addition, due to the culture-bound type of humour that is found in the selected objects of investigation, this chapter will also help to commence a diachronic study of the embeddedness of some culture-bound notions associated with the representation of a person’s or a group’s otherness. In particular, the analysis will pinpoint the translation strategies that were selected by the subjects at the time of producing equivalent reformulations of the original multimodal compositions. From a general perspective, most of the students’ retextualizations rely upon the so-called “Otherness of the South”, which is one of the most employed strategies for the adaptation and localization of humour for Italian people. Additionally, as concerns the written dimension of the target versions, the students who were involved in this research resort to English, which is considered as the most appropriate linguistic choice to make target texts available to international recipients. Finally, from the extralinguistic viewpoint, the examined memes reveal that images function as a form of multimodal compensation, aiming to guide the envisaged viewers’ appropriate interpretation of the senders’ intentionality.