Multimodal Uses of English as a Lingua Franca and Transmodal Strategies of Reformulation in Asynchronous Intercultural Mediation

This paper enquires into the reformulation strategies in cases of intercultural mediation over the Internet. The case study is represented by the transmodal renderings for international receivers of selected articles from the Italian Decreto flussi 2020 and the Directive 2013/32/EU of the European Parliament, which were produced in the context of the PRIN 2022 PNRR research project entitled “Acceptability strategies through variations of English as a lingua franca in multicultural and multimodal discourse types”. Two specific strategies of reformulation emerge. One is the production of “multimodal compensations”, trying to guide the viewers’ appropriate interpretation of the illocutionary force through polysemiotic uses of English as a Lingua Franca. Another strategy is defined here as “depersonalised personalisation”. It involves the depiction of stylised human figures so as to entail the inclusive and universal nature of the retextualisations.