Translating Italy: Cultural Diplomacy and Nation-branding in "ITALY. Land of Wonders"

This thesis investigates translation as a soft power tool in Italian digital cultural diplomacy, focusing on “ITALY. Land of Wonders”, a multilingual serious game commissioned by the Italian Ministry of Foreign Affairs to promote Italian cultural heritage internationally. Drawing on an interdisciplinary framework intersecting cultural diplomacy, nation branding, game studies, translation studies, and imagology, the study examines how the English localization of the game contributes to the image-building of Italy for international audiences. Through a parallel-corpus analysis, the study maps the patterns that emerge when Italian cultural content is translated into English and what they reveal about how Italy is represented on the global stage. The thesis concludes that translation is not a neutral process but an ideological one, in which the translator becomes an invisible yet significant actor in shaping Italy’s international image.