Rivista internazionale di tecnica della traduzione n.08 - 2004

This paper documents the approach I followed in the translation into Italian of a normative text, the Rules of procedure of the Lower House of the Netherlands, for publication by the Italian Chamber of Deputies. I first try to characterize the source text as a token of the legal and normative genre; I then look briefly at the literature on legal translation and suggest that the debate on translation techniques to be applied to legal translation could be subsumed in the more general debate on the ethics of translation. I submit that not all legal translation should necessarily strive for equivalent legal effect in the target system and that the distinction between documentary and instrumental translation strategies is relevant for this task. The second part of the paper looks at how a documentary strategy can be pursued at the level of structure, syntax and lexis with reference to the languages involved, leading to a target text that is still marked as foreign but recognizable as belonging to the Italian legal genre.

This paper sets out to analyze the methodological processes underlying the first Italian translation, published as late as 1993, of Izaak Walton’s longstanding classic The Compleat Angler (1653). After a brief introduction to the work and an overview of some critical comments, a number of general issues preliminary to the translating process is then examined: first and foremost, the still highly controversial nature of the book, which can be seen at the same time as an angling handbook with a very practical purpose or as a conscious literary work of a man close to the lyricism of the seventeenth-century metaphysical poets; the need to account for the temporal hiatus existing between the original work and the translation and, consequently, the choice of a suitable linguistic variety for the Italian text. The focus is subsequently shifted to Walton’s own language and style, as well as to some peculiarities of his characters’ idiolects and to the rendering of the poems and ballads with which the work is interspersed. All of these aspects are examined in parallel with the Italian translation and at times, for purposes of comparison, with the latest French version of the book.

This study takes into consideration some essential features of Dutch medical language, contrasting them with features of Italian medical language and comparing these data with observations made on other Germanic and Romance languages. The purpose is to give an outline of the typological position of Dutch and Italian with respect to their language families. First, Dutch nominal compounds are analysed, focusing on a phenomenon typical of Germanic languages: a double vocabulary, consisting of a native and a non-native, neoclassical layer. Attention is then shifted to the morphosyntactic level, highlighting the specific behaviour of adjectives in Italian and other Romance languages, in particular their syntactic functionality and right-branching structure, which favours clausal expansion. As a consequence of stronger nominalization patterns in Italian with respect to Dutch, complex prepositions are briefly analysed; followed by a discussion of the verbal system, which emphasizes the use of concrete forms and complex verbs in Dutch. Both exhibit a typical Germanic style, which is in strong contrast with the more abstract, grammatical hardware-like verbs of Italian and other Romance languages.

Translation theorists have so far devoted scant attention to the translation of philosophical texts. The author of the present article, drawing on his own experience in the translation of two books of philosophy, attempts to illustrate some of the typical problems found in this field. Two kinds of problems are identified: the use of technical terms, often of the philosopher’s own invention, which may be almost untranslatable, and the difficulties inherent in the use of a literary, metaphorical language, with all the consequent ambiguity and stylistic questions involved. The terminological problems are illustrated by reference to the translation of a book on Aristotle, while the literary issues are illustrated by reference to a text.

The paper describes the International Classification of Functioning (ICF), published in 2001 by the World Health Organisation. Based on a thorough revision of a former classification (the International Classification of Impairments, Disabilities and Handicaps of 1980), the ICF is used mainly in the field of health and disability. The revision process that took place between the two classifications led to profound changes and is here characterised as an evolution as far as both content and terminological aspects are concerned. In particular, the terminological innovations the ICF presents regard not only the terms themselves but also the terminological principles underlying the classification. The paper also looks at the ICF as an example of terminological standardisation, discussing problems that are generally linked to standardisation in fields other than manufacturing and the hard sciences. Finally, a few hints are made to the process whereby the ICF was translated into other languages and some translated terms are discussed with particular reference to German and Italian.

The aim of this paper is twofold. First, to help in establishing the true extent of the influence of scientific English on its Italian counterpart, especially at the level of the meaning-making practices of the Italian scientific community. Second, to provide a small contribution to the hypothesis of “core” patterns in scientific language across different languages following Halliday (1993). To achieve both aims, the linguistic evolution of a specialist subject field (medicine) which has been particularly influenced by English has been monitored over a 60-year time span (1939-2000) by investigating a small corpus, mainly on the topic of seborrhea and acne, consisting of original texts in Italian taken from textbooks on dermatology aimed at university students. The specific patterns of scientific language which are being monitored for measuring variation over time are mainly by-products of “grammatical metaphor”, which Halliday and Martin (1993) see as the most characteristic feature of the written “discourse for doing experimental science” (nominalization, choices for Theme and New, simple structure of clauses and sentences, etc.).

In LSP translating the production of naturally-sounding, idiomatic target texts is often taken to mean special attention in the use of terminology. However, research in the distribution of the elements of the message in different languages shows that the representation of the information structure is language-specific and that there are language-specific focus-attributing positions within the syntactic structure of sentences. In this paper, features of information structure and focus-attributing positions will be studied in a corpus of English-Italian translations of popular physics articles and compared with a corpus of original Italian articles on the same topic to see if the Italian information structure is used in translation or whether target texts reproduce the original English information structure. Results will show that translations use – at least to a certain extent – the original English information structure, therefore making target texts sound partly unnatural. A number of revision strategies will be proposed to reinstate a more typical Italian information structure in order to ensure that the informational value of sentence elements is preserved and higher-quality LSP translations are produced.

Rivista Internazionale di Tecnica della Traduzione of the Scuola Superiore di Lingue Moderne per Interpreti e Traduttori, University of Trieste (Dipartimento di Scienze Giuridiche, del Linguaggio, dell’Interpretazione e della Traduzione) is a refereed international journal published once a year. The aim of the journal is to provide a forum of discussion for the multifaceted activity of translation as well as related issues such as terminology and terminography, lexicology and lexicography, contrastive analysis, corpus linguistics, and intercultural communication. The journal is mainly focused - but not limited to – specialized, i.e. non-literary, translation and is open to different theoretical approaches including contributions from qualified professionals operating on the translation market. Articles are mainly published in Italian and English, but articles in other European languages are also accepted, provided they are preceded by an Abstract in English. Each issue of the journal contains a section devoted to a specific topic, but contributions on other subjects as well as papers by young researchers and reviews are also very welcome.