So, let’s imagine that a global pandemic shuts down your university’s study abroad program in Italy, but you still want your students to be able to connect with your home-away-from-home. You want them to experience the magic of putting their Italian to use, to see firsthand the nuances of culture enmeshed in the words of another language. You want them to get to travel in their imaginations if they can’t get on a plane. What to do?
The castle atop the village of Gagliano Aterno, Abruzzo, Italy, where Wayne State students study abroad
Wayne in Abruzzo
Wayne State University has a unique, long-running study abroad program in Italy, where for a month in the summer, students live, study, and adventure from a home base in Gagliano Aterno, Abruzzo, Italy. The tiny village of Gagliano Aterno, which is situated in the heart of the Apennine mountains east of Rome, is the enchanting and hospitable summer campus for our program. I teach an Italian film course there, and we study the different ways cinema interacts with and shapes the dramatic landscapes around us, while watching films in places like the monastery courtyard or the town’s one bar. We couldn’t go to Abruzzo in summer 2020 or summer 2021, and we missed our friends and those mountain landscapes terribly!
Italian cinema to the rescue
Like all of Italy’s twenty regions, Abruzzo has a Film Commission dedicated to helping film and television producers make movies there. One of the primary goals of the Film Commission d’Abruzzo is to help locations scouts and film crews navigate the many striking locations across the region. Since they want to welcome films from around the world, information needs to be available in Italian and English. The website has to communicate in clear and compelling terms the magic of hilltop villages, the wild beauty of the Adriatic coastline, the intricate architecture of ancient churches, castles, and monasteries.
Translation internship v 1.0
This summer, a team of four students stepped forward when I asked for volunteers for a pilot summer internship project in collaboration with Abruzzo’s Film Commission, led by Donato Silveri. Pallavi Kurakula, Danielle Maus, Matthew Prisco, and Paula Qefaliaj have spent the past months working as an energetic and collaborative team to translate breaking news from the world of Italian cinema–festival and award announcements, new films and film screenings–but most importantly, dozens of descriptions Abruzzese locations for English-language audiences. We were able to support the Film Commission’s global mission, while getting to know all kinds of sites in Italy–and add to our list of places to go someday, when at last it’s safe to travel. And the team honed their skills as Italian speakers and translators while building their resumes with some pretty unique credentials.
Future posts in this space will feature contributions written by Pallavi, Danielle, Matthew, and Paula, as well as by our collaborator Donato Silveri, about their experiences as translators and about Abruzzo. They’ll unravel some of the complexities of transforming Italian into English, and tell you about destinations that are now on their list of places to travel.