Rivista internazionale di tecnica della traduzione n.03 - 1998

This article discusses the concept of cognitive familiarity and the irnportance of schemata (schematic knowledge) in the acquisition of translation and interpretation skills. It reports un experiment carried out regularly in the author's Russian-Italian interpreting classes as part of a number of exercises which are preparatory to interpreting training. Students are given two weeks for activating their schematic-encyclopaedic knowledge of media language and, more specifically, of the rhetorical routine represented by the titles of regular columns of Italian papers. Students are then asked to translate as many as two hundred column titles from Russian papers and magazines. Through lexical brainstorming, students are subsequently encouraged to verbalise all possible associations. After completing this task, their attention is drawn to some morphosyntactic diffrences between the two languages in terms of the categories of determination, nominalisation, adjective groups, potential source of interference, etc. The cultural (both explicit and implicit), linguistic and textual elements which characterise this type of text, help students proceduralise strategic solutions to translation problems. The interest-arousing and attention catching functions of this text typology should stimulate students to activate frames of reference and rhetorical routines which enable them to find appropriate solutions and transfer strategies in a concentrated way, thereby developing creativity and idiomaticity. This exercise may be useful not only to check their internalisation of translation strategies (singlular/plural shifts, recourse to analytical constructions, lexical by-pass strategies or compensation procedures to transfer Russian prepositional and adverbial phrases), but also to make students aware of the importance of cultural adaptation in translation. The pedagogical aim of this task is to combine the development of students' procedural knowledge (know-how and know-when) with thut of declarative knowledge (know-why). In performing these exercises, students will not confine themselves to semantic-lexical transformations of the SLT but will be forced to mindshift between two cultures and get into the habit of changing cultural frames, thus drawing upon their schematic-encyclopaedic knowledge.

The focus of this paper is on terminological definitions. The first part deals with their role in terminology and examines some basic issues for their creation and selection. Among these are the distinction between concept and meaning in LSP, the preferente given to analytical definitions, the importance of some recent developments in the theories of prototypes and fuzzy edges and the opposition langue vs. parole in terminology. The second part of the article considers definitions from the viewpoint of a specific recipient, namely the technical translator's. The paper proposes a partial typology of the functions of definitions in technical and scientific translation. According to this hypothesis, definitions are used mainly for identifying terms, checking conceptual equivalence, filling terminological gaps, comprehending the source text and as a source of lexical-stylistic information for the production of the target text.

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.

In the wide array of translation activities, one specialised type is the muitilingual translation of the speeches by the Members of the European Parliament during its part-sessions. This kind of translation task might best be handled with a functionai approach, essentially because of its mixed nature: parliamentary speeches in fact belong neither clearly to the oral nor to the written code, but are instead a cross-over between the two. The feature of 'deoralising ' the original text, together with the strongly persuasive character of political discourse in general and the highly conventionalised and international terminology in use in the European Union may be considered as the major factors determining the translator's approach to this particular text type.

The article highlights fundamental events in the life of Marguerite Duras better to appreciate their profound influence on the literary, cultural and intellectual development of the writer. Subsequently, an analysisi is carried out of specific linguistic and stylistic aspects of Duras' last two works and of the strategies implemented for their translation into Italian. Structural analogies and dissimilarities of the language pair French-Italian are considered with a view to a critical assessment of the product of the translation process.

This review focuses on the translation of a selection of poetry written by Federico García Lorca entitled “Alle cinque della sera. Lamento per Ignacio e altre poesie”. The translations themselves provide excellent examples of bad translations. Though translating is never an easy task, it is even more taxing when the text is poetry. In this particular example, the source and the target languages come from the sarne family. The distortions apparent here, both formal and semantic, demonstrate how superficially certain translators have judged their understanding of the language they were translating from. Moreover, they appear to have been unaware that it is, in fact, the affinity between the two languages which lulled them into a false sense of security. The paper highlights a number of these infelicities, inappropriacies and complete errors which have been brought about by an excess of imagination, carelessness or plain ignorance. It also highlights some of the more surprising and unfounded comments and cultural information offered to the target text reader.