‘Obamania’ and how Italy joined in the party

This research belongs to the framework of Descriptive Translation Studies and Critical Discourse Analysis. The translation of news and political discourse proves challenging because of the higher degree of manipulation that characterises it and questions the boundaries between translation and interpreting. This case study focuses on the inauguration day of Obama’s presidency. The texts selected as the object of analysis and grouped in two subcorpora are articles in English and Italian collected on 20 January 2009 on online news providers for the first subcorpus and, for the second one, the Italian translations of the speech on the three main Italian dailies (online versions), ANSA (news agency) and Il Sole 24 Ore. The goal of this research is twofold: on the one hand it analyses the translation process behind the reporting of such an extraordinary and global event, paying particular attention to the cultural aspects. On the other hand, it investigates into what the analysis of translation – through a corpus-assisted approach - can offer as a critical discourse analysis tool.