Proximization Amidst Liquidity: Osama bin Laden's Death Translated

The purpose of this paper is to critically analyse Barack Obama’s speech announcing the killing of Osama bin Laden and the related translations and comments published in Italian newspapers. The speech can be analysed from several perspectives: this investigation concentrates on proximization strategies (Cap 2008) and the way in which these reflect a relation of hegemony (Baudrillard 2009). According to Cap, proximization strategies in political discourse are employed for legitimizing goals: recipients recognise the danger as close to them and they consequently favour any policy likely to guarantee a higher degree of protection. The hypothesis investigated here is that the trends of globalization and hegemony weaken the power of proximization strategies. While such weakness is aptly managed and backgrounded in the source text – through the postulation of a fluid boundary between Inside the Deictic Center (IDCs) and Outside the Deictic Center entities (ODCs) (Cap 2008) – the process of translation makes the weakness evident in its contradictions. The underlying assumption of this work is that the close analysis of translation choices can prove useful as an additional critical tool, favouring the recognition of discursive practices deployed in the source text while revealing how new practices are generated through their intralingual, interlingual and intersemiotic translation.