16Audiovisual Latino Media in the US: The Emergence of Bilingual Media Text Genres in the Interface between Language Contact, Language Policy and Translation
Abstract: The purpose of Latino media research is to identify, describe and classify the contact-related media text genres production of the Spanish-language broadcast television network Univisión since 2004 combining Luhmann’s Systems Theory approach (1988; 42009) with text linguistics (Gansel 2011), translation studies and sociolinguistic concepts like bilingualism and language ideologies (Androutsopoulos 2007; del Valle 2007). It could be argued that the Spanish-language mass media in the US form an important social system (Luhmann 42009) in which bilingual actors (producers and consumers) carry out linguistic actions by using specific normative concepts and ideologies. As an entity of language policy, they have created the Manuales de estilo, a text genre which proposes the basic conditions for the standardization of Spanish (cf. NAHJ 2003; AP 2014) as an important prerequisite of a monolingual medial communication practice and, furthermore, the establishment of this minority language in the US. Against the background of their experiences in bilingual everyday communication, however, they create diverse bilingual practices of media communication, which are addressed to a growing bilingual audience in the US (audience design) and gain more and more acceptance (even among journalists and linguists). An explicit indication of this development is the apparent bilingual disposition of some media text genres broadcast at Univisión, which is mainly due to audiovisual translation and, in contrast to literature and film, to the ideological language background of monolingüismo. As the bilingual Latino addressees of those media set trends, which lead to the quantitative increase of English and bilingual Latino media, they have to be regarded as actors of language policy, as well. In this way, they are enabled to participate in different social systems, in this case, the English- and Spanish-language mass media in the US.
Keywords: bilingualism, language policy, Latino media, Spanish-language media in the US, systems theory, television, text linguistics, translation studies, United States
1Introduction
The use of English in television programs for Latinos143 in the US is a phenomenon that has paved its way into Spanish-language mass media in the last few years. A possible explanation for this are the results of the 2010 Census: 50.5 million Hispanics live in the United States (16.3% of the total population), 60% of them were born in the US and thus speak English as their mother tongue, 82% of them speak both English and Spanish.144 This stands in contrast with the idea of a homogeneous Latin community (pan-latinidad) in which all members speak Spanish and a majority share the same cultural values (Catholic, familiar, traditional, conservative, emotional, passionate about music and dance), which the Spanish-language mass media has transmitted until now. However, this ethnic community is not at all socially and linguistically homogenous, but completely heterogeneous.145 One of the main reflections of this situation is the present Latino media landscape, which is becoming more and more complex: In addition to English, Spanish and bilingual print media, Spanish-language audiovisual media146 are developing new strategies oriented towards bilingual and bicultural persons, programs and channels dismissing the idea that Spanish language is the single symbol for latinidad which doesn’t mean necessarily that Spanish is no longer a symbol of ethnic identity.
This is undoubtedly a business model in which economic criteria, or more precisely the media struggle for audience ratings, determine the use of languages and the representation of hybrid, transnational and multi-ethnic identities, which in fact are a reality in Latin America and the Caribbean. It is the economic power of Hispanics and the Hispanic market, which has significantly increased the “value” of the Spanish language for commercial marketing directed to Latinos.147 The growing intergenerational bilingualism of Latinos born in the US established by the 2010 Census, leads to the increasing use of bilingual marketing strategies (cf. Colombi 2012 regarding print media). The data collected in this project during the period from 2004 to 2012 shows that even political marketing and reporting in audiovisual media follow this trend, closely connected to the growth of the political power of Latinos. Androutsopoulos (2007, 226) argues that it is a sort of “marketing appeal of hybridity”, which results from a close relation between commercialization and bilingualism, celebrated first of all in comedy, mainstream cinema and literature. It might be reasonably assumed that the tendency for bilingual media production and consumption is due to the fact that it takes place in a context of increasing social and individual bilingualism, which can be considered as an alternative to assimilation and diglossia and shows that the US is becoming a bilingual and bicultural society.
A basic precondition for this phenomenon is the existence of Latino media as a channel of public communication (cf. Castañeda 2008). First of all, it is a significant fact that Latino journalists, even if they are bilingual, can mostly be characterized by a monolingual and standard-oriented use of Spanish, which is based on their self-conception as an institution for the construction of the US-American Latino community (cf. Knauer 2005). This does not automatically exclude bilingual language practices from public communication, but they are mostly represented as individual practices without institutional significance (cf. Androutsopoulos 2007, 207ss.) as is the case with Latino media in the US, although since their emergence in the 19th century, there exist, apart from English- and Spanish-language mass media, so-called bilingual media (cf. Cervantes 2005). Sociocultural transformation processes such as 1) transnational movements of people and information, 2) the changing conditions for media production and reception in which media become accessible to marginalized groups as well and, therefore, 3) the growing integration and participation of these groups in social processes, have fundamentally changed this historical image within the US by establishing the use of multiple languages in public spaces, as in the urban linguistic landscapes of American cities such as Los Angeles, Miami or Washington (cf. Franco-Rodríguez 2008; Yanguas 2009), but also in the bilingual presentation of the government’s webpages, translation services in public administration, etc. However, mass media play a comparatively small role in the (socio) linguistic research on Spanish (and English) in the US, which in relation to bilingualism focuses on the everyday use of language(s).148 In the case of the book as a medium or literature, Callahan (2004) argues that bilingual practices tend to be considered imitative, artificial or unauthentic, because they are not characterized by spontaneity as in everyday language, but have a high degree of planning and control, thus not being authentic enough for sociolinguistic research. In principle, this is also true in the case of screenplays in which so-called fictitious orality is constructed by inventing protagonists that show intentionally-created linguistic peculiarities like codeswitching as an element of content design (cf. Blum 2013). Recent findings also show that
–an audiovisual medium like television always has a higher degree of authenticity, because its specific conditions of production do not permit the complete elimination of spontaneity, as in the case of live broadcasts;
–further sociolinguistic concepts are needed in order to establish links to other disciplines like media studies and media linguistics, as the approach proposed here is transdisciplinary; i.e., it results from the complex definition of the concept of media itself (cf. Stöckl 2012).
The resulting fundamental question is how the integration of English in political communication, which has been practiced in the last years at the Spanish-language broadcast network Univisión, influenced the emergence of audiovisual media text genres. The study’s aim is to detect the text patterns used in this process as well as the external factors that determine them.
2Analysis of Latino mass media in the US
In terms of transdisciplinarity, the approach includes multiple dimensions that correlate with the sociological, cultural and code-based definitions of the term “medium” (cf. Stöckl 2012, 16) and that take into consideration the social actors operating in the domain of the mass media as well as the level of text and language. This kind of transdisciplinarity is related to qualitative analysis that combines an external contextualization and an internal description of linguistic and textual manifestations of bilingualism in the Latino media, which suggest the emergence of bilingual media text genres149 and their institutionalization in public communication by bilingual actors (journalists, spectators). It can be expected that two basic strategies are operating in this context: the separation and/or synthesis of two languages or varieties (US-American Spanish and English) on the macro- and microstructural level of media text genres.150
2.1Latino Media as a Social System
Starting from a linguistic point of view oriented to cultural studies, Stöckl (2012) considers media to be a social institution for the production of texts/messages and thus focuses on text production without specifying further the question of their external context. This is a theoretical question, which until now has been discussed in text linguistics by assigning text genres to so-called areas of communication. Yet, the results do not even approximately reflect the complexity of social communication processes. A possible way is to look for synergies between text linguistics and Luhmann’s Systems Theory approach (1988; 42009), according to which areas of communication like the mass media can be conceptualized as social systems with specific 1) functions (self-reference) such as information, education, entertainment; 2) consumers; 3) integration/participation and topics (reference to external factors). For text linguistics, this approach is fruitful, because social systems generate meaning and operate or communicate on multiple levels. According to Gansel (2011, 30), this kind of exploration of text genres is possible if communication is seen as a triple selection of information, message and understanding, which not only leads to the development and reproduction of new text genres, but also favors system-specific text patterns. At the same time, the question arises of how those text genres can be functionally classified in the communication of a social system. The concrete synergies between text linguistics and the Systems Theory consist in the possibility to combine the different dimensions of communication and the concomitant generation of meaning of a social system in the analysis (cf. 2.3). For example, the subject dimension can be combined with the content structure and the linguistic structure or the social dimension can be combined with function and situation (cf. Gansel 2011, 39). However, Luhmann (1988, 16) does not consider only social systems to be systems of meaning that have their own way of operating, but also psychic systems, which, being systems of consciousness, think, perceive and feel. Here, they will be regarded as moving forces of meaning production within a social system and as observers of the other social systems.
Latino media as such can be regarded as a social system, which emerged and developed in a stable situation of language contact. Its characteristics are linked to the mono- and/or bilingual communication of social actors (psychic systems), who produce and consume media text genres that correspond to specific language ideologies. In terms of the business model mentioned above, there exists a relationship of interdependency between media producers and consumers as two groups of social actors that demand a high degree of planning and control of text production with regard to audience design.151 Nevertheless, it makes the results appear authentic within the observed social system, since producers (and consumers) are usually bilingual (cf. López Morales 2009 regarding the individual national groups). For that reason, the outcome of this process – the audiovisual media products in the form of monolingual and/or bilingual media text genres – represents both the social and the individual bilingualism of the actors.
2.2Media Actors as Social Actors
Despite the American language policy regarding the so-called heritage languages like Spanish, which has been intolerant from the beginning (cf. de la Cuesta 2009; del Valle/García 2013), Latino journalists reveal a high level of (bilingual) linguistic professionalism and education. They form a group that substantially shapes the relieve social of Latinos, something that Moreno Fernández (2004) considers to be a crucial precondition for the development of the US towards a bilingual and bicultural country, namely bilingual speakers who are able to separate languages and to avoid language mixing as required by the Manuales de estilo.
This specific kind of linguistically-professional behavior makes them important actors of language policy regarding Spanish in the United States “con poder de prescripción” [‘with prescriptive power’] (Moreno Fernández 2004, 3). They move within two domains of language policy: language planning and the handling of multilingualism, i.e., the establishment of a written and spoken standard of Spanish in the United States and its preservation in a diglossic situation with English as the dominant language.
2.2.1Language Ideologies of the Media Actors
The analysis of the professional linguistic behavior of the media actors in the corpus reveals that its particularity results from the reproduction of existing language ideologies152 regarding the non-mediatized everyday language, but also in the creation of new language ideologies. Thus, above all the already mentioned Manuales de estilo, but also some descriptive studies on Spanish media language in the US discuss the avoidance of: 1) transfer from English (always using the concept of Spanglish with its negative connotations), and 2) regionalisms along with 3) the promotion of an español internacional (cf. AP 2014; Betti 2008; NAHJ 2003; Patzelt 2013; Velásquez 2007).
This is a discussion led and influenced by Spain against the background of the language ideologies of monolingüismo and panhispanismo, which is being conducted in an institutional network formed by the Real Academia Española (del Valle 2011), the Asociación de Academias de la Lengua Española, the Instituto Cervantes, Fundación del Español Urgente as well as the Academia Norteamericana de la Lengua Española, the National Association of Hispanic Journalists and the Observatorio de la lengua española y de las culturas hispánicas en los EEUU. The special contribution of Spanish-language mass media in the USA consists in creating and promoting a neutral and generally accepted Spanish with some US-American peculiarities as a basis for both a regional and an international standard (cf. Knauer 2005; Moreno Fernández 2004).
In view of the fact that this standard remains to be described, the question arises, what kind of relationship exists between non-mediatized everyday language and media language as an indicator for the above-mentioned authenticity of the studied media. While from a sociolinguistic perspective the everyday language of the Latinos is understood as
“para referirse al español que hablamos todos en Norteamérica, pero en sus vertientes más informales y populares, al habla del hogar, la tienda, la iglesia, el pasillo y la calle, sobre todo cuando es usada por hispanohablantes que normalmente leen y escriben en español con poca frecuencia, pero que lo utilizan con regularidad y fluidez en sus formas orales” (Otheguy 2009, 222).153
Francisco Moreno Fernández defines its future relationship to media language in the following way:
“Con el paso del tiempo, lo natural sería que se fraguara y estabilizara una variedad de español característica de los EEUU en la que, sobre la base de un español americano, se reunieran elementos de diversas áreas hispánicas, así como componentes derivados del contacto con el inglés, los más difundidos y aceptados por todas las comunidades hispanas de la Unión. Esta variedad recibiría actitudes positivas que permitirían a los hablantes concebir una equiparación del español con el inglés, como instrumento cualificado para la comunicación social. Asimismo, esa variedad del español estadounidense sería la utilizada mayoritariamente en los medios de comunicación social. En cierto modo, tal realidad ya está ocurriendo en las cadenas CNN y Univisión, que buscan soluciones neutras o aceptadas de forma general, incluyendo algunos usos que se van haciendo habituales en los EEUU” (Moreno Fernández 2004, 5s.).154
It is apparently right to say that there exists a close correlation between the linguistic practices of Latinos in everyday communication and the mediatized communication addressed to them, since the usually bilingual Latino journalists know these practices from their personal communication experience in other social systems like everyday life and apply or avoid them competently in their professional social system or communicative domain. This applies especially to linguistic (syntactic) variables of everyday language that are partly caused by contact (e. g., the frequent use of subject pronouns, estar + gerund, tenses, pragmatic markers, etc.), which would speed up grammaticalization processes and would evoke a growing acceptance of these linguistic forms because of their use in public communication. In contrast to everyday language, in the case of the journalists, translations (from English news) reinforce this tendency as well. The language use of Univisión has shown parallels to the previously mentioned characteristics of everyday Latino language, since it was clearly based on the traditions of Spanish as a historical individual language in which transfer from English was (supposed to be) systematically eliminated. The background was the above-mentioned transnational and homogenizing conceptualization of Spanish-dominant target groups (in the United States and Hispanic America) who were to be reached using a Mexican Spanish oriented standard. The latter was also constructed as the most important symbol of ethnic identity and a requirement for belonging to Hispanic elites.
Given economic and political constraints, and in particular the struggle for ratings between the English- and Spanish-language mainstream media, Univisión maintains its transnational orientation, but shifting in the perception of the national target group of Latinos: Univisión gives up its homogenizing view in favor of a stronger localization with particular focus on the social variable of “immigrant generation” and also starts to see Latinos as consumers and citizens in the US. As a result, it becomes functionally more differentiated as a social system concerning information, education and enabling the Spanish-speaking Latinos to participate in the social system of the US.
Thus, Univisión has become more and more oriented towards English-speaking and bilingual Latinos by integrating English in its programs. Its strategy consists in combining the bilingualism of the actors (journalists, addressees) and media products (media text genre) with a strict separation of languages155. As indicated above, this process is subject to economic criteria and thus takes place against the background of another language ideology that perceives language and bilingualism as a recurso económico [‘economic resource’] and is regarded not only as specifically US-American (cf. del Valle/Villa 2007).
2.3The Relatedness of Latino Media to Code
Now, these findings of language policy and ideology will be related to the diversity of the bilingual practice of medial communication, which is obviously gaining more and more acceptance amongst media actors. Thus, the characterization of the external conditions under which these media texts are produced and consumed is followed by the analysis of their concrete code-related disposition, starting from the contemplation of the medium as a system of signs and rules of its use (cf. Stöckl 2012). The corpus consists of journalistic texts (“Debate presidencial televisado”, “Gran Encuentro”) and advertising texts (anuncios electorales) of Univisión.156 They are part of the totality of text types that were produced in relation to the subject of the presidential elections in the United States from 2004 to 2012.157
In order to describe them, the concept of what is a text must be understood in a broader way including the interdependency of linguistic signs with other semiotic systems used in the audiovisual media (cf. Burger/Luginbühl 42014, 407), because television transmits its texts visually and acoustically and also written verbal text elements are becoming increasingly important in this context.
The study focuses on the analysis of
–the verbal level in spoken and written modality, i.e., the language use and the design of text genres in the continuum of mono- and bilingual practices of speaking and writing, linguistic variables of Spanish in the United States as well as audiovisual translation practices in the media;
–the visual level with regard to the manifestations of written language that appear there (subtitles, text in the picture) and speakers as media actors.
For recurring themes such as presidential elections, and concomitant intentions like the struggle for votes, dramaturgical patterns or production patterns are created, representing habitual process and product structures (cf. Gnach 2011). Their code-related character will be described in the following. The method applied here consists in the combination of the Systems Theory and text linguistics (cf. 2.1) as well as the distinction between a macro- and a microstructural level of text analysis, which is important regarding textuality, i.e., the coherence and the cohesion of the examined text genres.
2.3.1 “Debate presidencial televisado” (Televised Presidential Debate)
Social dimension/situation/function: Since 2004, this text genre of the English language media has been broadcast at Univisión with a simultaneous translation into Spanish. Media interpreting is a special form of simultaneous interpreting in live television broadcasts. Its basic conditions include specific expectations of the target audience such as a quick and perfect interpretation as well as a high pressure to perform for the interpreter in view of the virtual and numerically large audience (cf. Snell-Hornby 21999, 311ss.). Thus, the interpreter can be regarded as an important new actor in Latino media.
Both candidates answer questions from the presenter and the audience about which they were informed in advance. Therefore, the answers can be considered prepared statements, which are supposed to inform and educate the recipients as potential voters in the field of politics.
Subject dimension/macro structure: The contributions of the two presidential candidates as well as the comments and questions of the moderator are simultaneously interpreted into Spanish. There is one individual interpreter assigned to each active participant of the debate. It is, however, a bilingual audiovisual media text genre that can be considered a parallel text,158 meaning that it consists of a combination of the oral source and target texts, the latter being perceptible only at the acoustic level but equivalent at the level of the content. As of now, the phenomenon of parallel texts has only been studied on the basis of written texts in translation studies. On the visual level, the contributions are related to specific speakers in the case of the source text. The voices of the interpreters, in contrast, are brought in from offstage.
Subject dimension/microstructure: The comparative analysis of both text parts also reveals a range of grammatical interferences and lexical uncertainties that are typical of simultaneous interpretations, but which partly also reflect the developments of Spanish in the US and which belong to the characteristics of bilingual text genres as far as the textual micro-level is concerned. One of the findings is the frequent use of subject pronouns in analogy to the English source text:
Kerry: I respect their views. I completely respect their views. I am a Catholic. And I grew up learning how to respect those views.
Interpreter: Yo respeto el punto de vista totalmente. Yo soy católico. Yo crecí aprendiendo a respetar estos puntos de vista. (3rd Televised Presidential Debate 2004)
Concerning the lexis, especially the political terminology, a number of variants for the English source term appear in the target text, e. g., en. “Americans” > sp. americanos, norteamericanos and estadounidenses; en. “college loans” > sp. becas and préstamos, en. “Pell Grants” > sp. concesiones, préstamos educacionales; en. “No Child Left Behind Act” > sp. Ley de que no se va a quedar rezagado ningún niño, Ley que quede rezagado ningún niño (3rd Televised Presidential Debate 2004).
The Spanish translation, which correlates with the English source text, shows significant traces of terminological uncertainty that the interpreters have regarding political communication. In general terms, this raises the question of the terminological authorities for Spanish in the US, e.g., the Academia Norteamericana de la Lengua Española.
2.3.2 “Gran Encuentro” in Spanish and English
Social dimension/situation/function: This text genre is equivalent to the “Debate” of the English-language media. It was produced first in 2012 by Univisión and was awarded the Premio de Periodismo Rey de España in the category of television.
As the name “Encuentro” expresses, the Latino journalists are not dealing with debates between the presidential candidates, but rather with conversations or interviews that are conducted by the Mexican-American journalists María Elena Salinas and Jorge Ramos as well as individual people from the audience with each presidential candidate. This newly created text genre especially targets bilingual Latinos with the aim to provide information and participation from their own perspective. This becomes evident at the visual level, as the interpreters’ voices come from offstage.
Subject dimension/macro structure: In contrast to Auer (1998), we are dealing here with bilingual conversations159 based on the pattern “one person – one language”, in which the questions are asked in Spanish and simultaneously interpreted into English for the candidate.160 The candidate’s English answers are simultaneously interpreted into Spanish for the Spanish-speaking audience of Univisión. This text genre was published on Facebook under the title “Meet the candidates with Mitt Romney/Barack Obama” and provides a simultaneous translation of the Spanish parts into English.
Subject dimension/microstructure: The Latino journalists use a neutral Spanish, which corresponds to a Hispano-American standard based on Mexican Spanish. The people from the audience who ask questions have different competences in Spanish with regional characteristics. The candidates speak American English.
Image: Judging from certain non-verbal reactions of the audience, it becomes clear that the participants excluding the candidate are bilingual (e. g., nodding or cheering as a reaction to the candidates’ English answers although the question was asked in Spanish).
2.3.3 “Gran Encuentro” in Spanish
Social dimension/situation/function: It was first in the gubernatorial elections of Colorado in 2014, when a debate between Anglo-American candidates was broadcast live in Spanish and without any translation by Univisión. This fact reveals the increasing willingness of Anglo-American politicians to speak Spanish themselves if required (for the election campaign). It has been proved by different studies that what counts for the addressees is the symbolic value, not the linguistic quality. On the visual level appear the Latino journalists and the candidates.
Subject dimension/macro structure: The Latino Journalists ask the candidates questions in Spanish, which are answered in Spanish, as well. Anglophone politicians become new actors in the social system of Latino media addressing Spanish-speaking Latinos during the election campaign.
Subject dimension/microstructure: The two politicians showed different linguistic competence with the usual characteristics or interferences of second language learner varieties.
2.3.4Anuncios electorales digitales y de television (Digital and television campaign commercials)
The electoral ads, which have been produced by campaigns and broadcast at Univisión since 2004, have become clearly differentiated in terms of their linguistic design. The following classification is based on forms of bilingual advertising in the Spanish-language press proposed by Colombi (2012):
–Audiovisual Translation (dubbing)
As a general rule, this strategy concerns English commercials for Anglo-Americans that are translated into Spanish, so that parallel texts are produced. However, those parallel texts are not copresent in the process of their creation like in the case of the “Debate presidencial televisado”, but copresent as products. They contain numerous language transfers and borrowings from English (cf. Knauer 2007). As the visual level remains unchanged, there appear written manifestations of English. Univisión only broadcast the Spanish version of the dubbed commercials.
–Audiovisual translation (subtitling)
These are subtitled ads with protagonists who speak either Spanish or English. The personal statements of personalities that support a candidate are often combined with the visual reproduction of concrete communication situations: The commercial “Honoring” from the electoral campaign of Barack Obama for example, shows the appointment of the Puerto Rican justice Sonia Sotomayor as Associate Justice of the Supreme Court of the United States by Barack Obama in 2009 concerning public and private domains of the use of English at the visual level. The family is constructed as a domain of Spanish. However, representation of Spanish in public (political) communication is done at the metacommunicational level of the corpus.
–(Re-)interpretation or recreation
This advertising strategy consists in presenting or “translating” the political culture of Anglo-Americans to Latinos in Spanish, e. g., by portraying personal conversations in Spanish between Latino election assistants and Latino voters or personal statements. The protagonists of the audiovisual texts are the candidates or persons that support their election campaign (relatives, politicians, artists, election assistants of the Latino community). They provide a comprehensive picture of the different competences that Latinos and Anglo-Americans have in Spanish.
All these text genre patterns reproduced or emerged in the context of audiovisual translation are based on the criteria of co-presence of the source and the target text. They differ from the point of view of reception and linguistic-textual design in the following ways:
–Dubbed and simultaneous translated texts or part of texts are isosemiotic texts (Gottlieb 2002, 189), meaning that they cannot be received at the same time, but the source text is replaced by the target text whose characteristics are transfer phenomena like “false friends”.
–In contrast, subtitled texts are diasemiotic (Gottlieb 2002, 189), in other words they make possible the parallel reception of the source and target text. Subtitling extends the source text by an additional meaningful element or channel that increases the degree of informative explicitness for the bilingual addressee. This argues in favor of a new, bilingual type of audiovisual media genre in the political communication.
At the same time, a type of communication is emerging that can be called a “minority language-English bilingualism” in the Spanish-language television and Internet. One of its special aspects is its functional character, which is not separated from the everyday communication of Latinos. But it has other formal preferences like avoiding hybridization (codeswitching) as far as possible.161 In this context, English is more frequently the second language of Latino actors, while Spanish is always the second language of the Anglo-Americans. The text patterns presented here reflect the model of a social bilingualism in the US, which is undergoing a change, since Spanish is increasingly used in political communication by Latinos and Anglo-Americans.
3Conclusions
Applying a transdisciplinary approach in the analysis of the audiovisual Latino media genres in the U.S., clearly demonstrates that as a social system, they have their own peculiarities regarding communication or their meaning production, namely the bilingualism of texts and their producers and recipients. This fact corresponds to the definition of bilingualism in the media proposed by Androutsopoulos (2007).
“as a set of processes by which institutional and vernacular media actors draw on linguistic resources from their own inheritance, their social environment and the wider semiotic flows they have access to in order to construct textures and voices that mediate and balance between immediate communicative exigencies, market expectations and loyalties to local and imagined communities” (Androutsopoulos 2007, 225).
The emergence of bilingual media text genres shows processes of overlapping between social and personal bilingualism, which can be described as follows:
- Bilingualism in the Latino media is no longer a marginal phenomenon of the contemporary media landscape.
- There are close correlations between bilingualism and commercialization, which in the meantime also include political marketing. Bilingualism is marketed, but at the same time, it has to be understood as a symbol of resistance against the dominant Anglo-American language and culture.
- The metacommunication of the analyzed audiovisual text genres indicates that both Latinos and Anglo-Americans introduce symbolic values like appreciation and respect for other cultures and languages or into the media discourse. This also means the appreciation of bilingualism, even if the results of this project show the dominance of English in domains of public communication.
- The public visibility of bilingualism is increasing also in audiovisual media.
In this way, the latter differ significantly from other media like radio, books, theater and film, in which: 1) multilingual protagonists are provided with linguistic peculiarities such as accents or codeswitching, and 2) the texts or part of texts which result from the audiovisual translation aren’t considered to be an constitutive element of the multimodal text of “film”. This is due to the fact that the presented (bilingual) text genres are functionally a part of the social system of Spanish-language mass media. With the objective to secure the processes of understanding, it combines political information and education for mono- and bilingual Latinos with the criterion of language separation instead of hybridization.
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