‘Tetù, taralli, viscotti regina and Palermitan mostaccioli’: subtitling food in ‘Inspector Montalbano’ by Andrea Camilleri

Culture-bound elements, such as food-related culture-specific items, affect both standard and regional variations and foster the debate on how to turn them in interlingual translation. In Andrea Camilleri’s novels and in their audiovisual translations, food celebrates victories, restores mental energies and depicts the regional boundaries of communication. Moreover, some food related utterances are diachronically, diastratically and diatopically relevant. This paper muses on some cases of Sicilian culinary heritage as represented by Camilleri in terms of symbols of “social issues” which deal with his characters; the analysis will, also, bring to light the role of borrowings, geographical allusions, idiomaticity and humour as particularly challenging features of translating food for the screen.