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In the age of convergence, bestselling novels have become parts of the phenomenon known as ‘branding’, and cultural production is highly conditioned by the mechanisms that regulate global markets. This article argues that if the contemporary global novel tends to render the plurilingual experience implicitly to ensure translatability, the use of dialect has become crucial for the construction of marginality on screen for products designed to travel internationally. By focusing on a case study grounded in the Italian context, a comparison between Roberto Saviano's Gomorra (2006), with its extensions in theatre, cinema, TV and fandom, and Elena Ferrante's tetralogy L'amica geniale (2011–2014), with its dramatized versions for radio, stage and television, it compares the intersection of language, space and power in recent examples of transmedia storytelling. Drawing on studies of multilingualism and marginality, the author addresses the following questions: how do linguistic strategies influence the portrayal of the urban periphery as a marginal, subaltern space? How does transmedia transposition relate to interlingual translation? Does the relation between fiction and the socio-linguistic reality represented change in the translation process? To what ends is dialect deployed in transnational productions designed for global reach, and what characterizes the reception by Italian and international audiences? A focus on transmedia adaptations, this article suggests, leads us to reconsider the paradigm of multilingualism in translation.

Through an analysis of the novels written under the pen name Elena Ferrante and of the paratextual elements that surround them, this article examines the portrayal of Naples and its outskirts in these narratives, and how the specific geographical and cultural context is rendered and variously translated for different audiences. It argues that the concealment of the author's identity has enhanced the perceived authenticity of the texts, and that the emphasis on marginal backgrounds and subaltern characters entails a contradiction not dissimilar to the phenomenon that Huggan (2001) describes as ‘staged marginality’ in the context of postcolonial narratives. Ferrante's cultural specificity can therefore be read as a highly ambivalent discourse that entails both resistance and adherence to the mechanisms of a global market. Lastly, the article examines how the emphasis on dialect influences the process of translation for diverse readerships, showing the relevance of the ‘Ferrante project’ within world...

In the last two decades, the task of the translator for the theater has been frequently discussed and translation has been recognized as an important element in the process of play production. In light of these developments, and keeping in mind that a translation, as a “politically and ideologically charged creative process of rewriting” ( Krebs and Minier, 2009 : 66), is always shaped by constrictions that go beyond linguistic and semantic criteria, this article examines and compares the Italian, German, and French dramatic texts of Luigi Pirandello's Questa sera si recita a soggetto and their relation to first productions in Germany and France, within the time frame of 1929–1935. The aim is to investigate strategies for drama translation in the context of the late 1920s to early 1930s ideology and to examine how translators' choices affected the representations of regional and national transnational identities. The analysis sheds light on drama translation as well as on the role of the translator in the process of play productions; in addition, it questions the porous boundaries between translations and adaptations, as well as the hierarchy according to which scholars have often read the “original” in relation to subsequent versions.