Tra marketing e politica culturale: il paratesto editoriale come dispositivo intersemiotico per il dialogo tra culture

In the case of translated works, which in the Italian market account for over 80% of the entire editorial production, the paratext plays a role of cultural mediation by helping to understand new cultural trends and carrying out a work of cultural normalization with an adaptation of the codes to landing audience. More generally, the paratext performs a cultural mediation function that makes dialogue between cultures possible. To achieve this objective, the paratext uses a centrifugal force that distances it from direct dependence on the single work and gives it a status of communicative autonomy, not only as a single text but as an isotopant trait, often part of a series, which together with other traits contribute to determining the identity of an enunciator. This enunciator can correspond to the author of the work or the editorial brand, the translator or the illustrator or to all these figures together. The communicative autonomy of the paratext is fully within the commercial logic of the publishing and more specifically book industry, which sees the paratext as a textual typology in some ways like press advertising. Like advertising, the paratext helps to spread values, focalized themes, points of view and to create the publisher's brand identity. In this way the paratext produces a system vision which can, in the case of translations, contribute to creating an image of the other. These functions overlap and intertwine, resulting, only in the best practices, as the result of a calibrated control of marketing and cultural policy. In many other cases, some functions can be prevalent and overbearing. Furthermore, in some cases, the lack of semiotic control can contribute to determining, even with scale effects, the creation of intercultural stereotypes. This paper retraces the functions of literary paratextuality from a theoretical point of view, defining the standardized functioning models of the paratext as an intersemiotic device for dialogue between cultures and trying to distinguish the objectives that have a cultural political function from the more markedly commercial ones.