Salvini, stereotypes and cultural translation: analysing anglophone news discourse on Italy’s ‘little Mussolini’

This paper investigates the semiotic affordances of the visual and linguistic modes employed by Anglophone news brands to create news on the controversial Italian politician, Matteo Salvini. Grounded in multimodal critical discourse perspectives, the study has two aims: to unpack the multimodal representations of Salvini as synecdoche of Italianness and to identify the role of cultural translation in the discursive construction of the Italian leader. The contribution posits that, although the ideological positioning of some news producers might coincide with that of Salvini, the temptation to slip into familiar tropes of Italianness will override any political alignment.