Adapting Specialist Knowledge on Screen to Transmit Scientific Theories: Inter-Epistemic Translation in the 'Jurassic Park' Movie Saga as Case Study.

According to Calsamiglia & van Dijk (2004) popularisation of scientific knowledge is a re-formulation of specialist discourse. Thus, popularisation might be considered a form of translation; within the paradigm of inter-epistemic translation (Bennet 2024a; Bennett 2024b; Bennet & Neves 2024), it might be regarded as a kind of “Science in Transit”, whereby “specialist knowledge is transmitted across disciplines, reformulated for different audiences, and reworked into imaginative literature, audiovisual content or works of art” (“The EPISTRAN Project” 2025). This process is particularly productive in sci-fi movies, whose plot focuses on future scientific or natural world developments caused by humans or unknown natural forces, which must be understood, tamed, or destroyed (Johnston 2011). Therefore, sci-fi movies exploit the affordances of popularisation to transmit specialist knowledge to the audience in order to present the scientific theories pivotal to the story. The long-standing movie franchise of Jurassic Park (1993-2025) is a case in point since it incorporates several disciplines (palaeontology, biology, bioethics, high-tech, IT, etc.), so the transmission of the corresponding theories is essential for the audience to understand the movie plots. The paper investigates the Jurassic Park saga as a case study of Science in Transit within the paradigm of inter-epistemic translation. The analysis is divided in two parts: the first part investigates the saga by analysing the strategies employed in the movies to transmit scientific theories to the audience in English. The second part of the paper considers the challenges that popularising these theories poses to subtitling by examining differences that might exist between Source Language/Culture (English) and Target Language/Culture (Italian). To do so, the popularised scientific theories of the first part are contrasted to their versions in the Italian subtitles. The aim is to ascertain which translation strategies (Díaz-Cintas and Remael 2014; Bolaños-García-Escribano and Díaz-Cintas 2019) are used in order to maintain the specialist knowledge as accessible in Italian audience as it is in English.