Mediating intercultural encounters on screen. The representation of non-professional interpreting in film

The chapter aims to shed some light on the different ways in which non-professional interpreting has been represented on the big screen. By "non-professional interpreting" we refer to those cases in which a bilingual character in a film acts as a linguacultural mediator on a specific occasion, without necessarily being a professional in the field. Generally, this lay interpreting is portrayed on screen when a film depicts an intercultural encounter, that is when the story has an "international" setting with characters coming from different countries and thus (allegedly) speaking different languages. The analysis of some examples excerpted from a rather diversified sample of films, spanning over time and space as well as cinematic genre, will show how diegetic interpreting in multilingual films operates on two different levels: characters' comprehension (horizontal dimension of communication) and viewers' understanding (vertical dimension). With no pretence of being exhaustive, the chapter will propose a theoretical framework whereby to interpret the different possibilities in which non-professional lingua-cultural mediation may be portrayed on the big screen.