Rivista internazionale di tecnica della traduzione n.18 - 2016

The Catcher in the Rye is a cult book of the 20th Century. Although he introduced no novelty in terms of narrative technique, Salinger achieved a realistic reproduction of teenage informal speech that was instrumental to the book’s artistic and poetic success. Similarly, Adriana Motti’s 1961 Italian translation of the novel was hailed as a literary turning point because of its linguistic innovations. This paper examines the main differences between Motti’s translation and Matteo Colombo’s 2014 version, which was produced with the explicit aim of “rejuvenating” its language. The study uses a quali-quantitative approach focussing on both lexicometric measurements and lexical aspects that can shed light on the purportedly updated imitation of teenage colloquial Italian. Our findings show that Colombo succeeded in decreasing the lexical richness and fragmenting syntactic structures in order to reflect Holden Caulfield’s highly repetitive idiolect. In addition, Colombo’s lexical selection discards many of Motti’s stylized and imaginative peculiarities and is more realistic and loyal to low-register Italian.