Dalla cortesia coreana a quella italiana: Un'analisi discorsivo-pragmatica dei sottotitoli realizzati dai fan per i K-Drama

This study investigates the translation of Korean politeness expressions into Italian within the context of fan-subtitled Korean dramas. The global expansion of the Korean Wave (Hallyu) has fostered distinct translation norms in fan communities, most notably the retention of Korean address terms (e.g., oppa, sunbaenim), marking a departure from conventional professional subtitling norms that favor domestication. Grounded in Brown and Levinson’s (1987) view of politeness as a universal, discourse-based strategy for managing interaction, the present study examines how such strategies are grammaticalized in Korean and subsequently rendered in Italian, adopting Brown’s (2011) framework to capture the structure of Korean honorific systems. This research addresses the fundamental typological asymmetry between Korean’s highly grammaticalized honorific system, which obligatorily encodes social relations through formalized linguistic forms, and Italian’s pragmatic system relying on T/V distinctions and modal strategies. Methodologically, a qualitative contrastive discourse analysis was conducted on a corpus of 335 utterance pairs extracted from the Italian fan subtitles of two Korean dramas, Lovely Runner and Love Scout. The investigation focused on the transfer of hearer honorifics, referent honorifics, address terms, and pragmatic politeness strategies. The analysis was organized into three dimensions: (1) the transfer of grammaticalized politeness devices, (2) the realization of pragmatic politeness strategies, and (3) the translation patterns influenced by social variables, namely hierarchy, familiarity, and formality. The findings reveal that fan translators employ four primary strategies: retention, substitution, pragmatic compensation, and omission. While grammaticalized honorific markers (e.g., -si-) are frequently neutralized or shifted into Italian modal structures (e.g., conditional mood) due to structural incompatibility, a particularly salient pattern of retention emerges in address terms, often realized through romanized forms. This selective retention serves to preserve the indexical function of Korean address terms, thereby enabling the multidimensional relational meanings encoded in hierarchy, familiarity, and formality to persist in the target text. The translation prioritizes the reconstruction of the discourse situation in Italian by relying on contextual and interactional factors rather than on linguistic fluency alone, thereby producing hybrid texts that navigate the typological asymmetry between the two politeness systems. These results have significant implications for cross-cultural pragmatics and Korean language pedagogy, suggesting that instruction for Italian learners should foreground the situational and relational logic of politeness rather than form-based equivalence.