Rivista internazionale di tecnica della traduzione n.10 - 2008

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.

This article aims to analyze and compare the Italian and the British languages of tourism, and the language used by translators in their translations of tourist websites into English. In particular, we will focus on mistranslations of collocations. The tools used for analysis are two sets of corpora: a comparable corpus made up of original Italian agriturismi websites and original British farmhouse holiday websites, and a parallel corpus made up of original Italian agriturismi websites and their translations into English. The theoretical framework adopted is the one proposed by Sinclair in his description of the phraseological approach to language. The results of the analysis show the importance of studying collocations across cultures and the strict relationship between language, culture, and promotional strategies.

We put forward two mathematical tools, called the rank distance and the bubble distance, to compare the ordinal structure of natural languages. Traditionally, ordinal structures have only been studied in a very basic and “abstract” context, as for example, the six idealised arrangements for the subject-verb-object sequence. Our tools allow one to get an overall picture of the ordinal distance between a text and its translation. Thinking of future work, availability of web resources will make it possible to conduct large-scale experiments, which will account for the difficulties experienced by simultaneous interpreters, say between Italian and German, or even more so between Italian and Turkish. However, if one wants to get a realistic picture of these differences, one has to abandon the traditional approach to mathematics, based on binary logics (true vs. false, black vs. white), and introduce the grey nuances made available by soft logic; in other words one has to relinquish the esprit de géometrie and adopt the esprit de finesse which is typical of soft computing. It is no coincidence that soft logic has been largely inspired by the flexible logical structures which are possessed by natural languages, rather than those of “hard” mathematics. A crisp mathematical approach will do for simple and abstract structures such as subject-verb-object, but it is wholly insufficient if one moves to the overall word order in actual texts.

In this paper, we propose to review the translation into Italian of the Autonomous Communities’ leaflets produced by TURESPAÑA, starting from the most important contributions it offers in relation to the treatment of cultural elements. Essentially, by using Nida’s classification of cultural settings, we focus on the components specifically, on those relating to the field of gastronomy. From this we attempt to identify the principal translation methods used, analysing thema in techniques that have been adopted in the texts to account for the cultural elements present in the original texts.

This paper focuses on the expression “mediazione linguistica” (ML) [LinguisticMediation], used in the current name of the degree-course class number 3 (recently renumbered as L-12) in Italy. The analysis carried out shows that the introduction of such an expression is based neither on normative grounds, nor on other official Italian institutional documents. Furthermore, the label does not seem to have been accepted or adopted by professionals, and contrasts with the definitions of the European Council Common European Framework for Languages, the only official document in which the expression “ML” has been defined and institutionally adopted. The inappropriate use of this label has opened up the way to a variety of often arbitrary interpretations of the expression by many Italian degree courses, and ML often tends to be confused with Cultural Mediation. Moreover, the conceptualization of the linguistic mediator as a lower-level professional in comparison to translators or interpreters seems to be utterly unjustified and unsatisfactory. Italian universities should therefore consider the origin and the meaning of the expression ML with more care and precision, and it would be highly desirable to use it as little as possible in the names of different degree courses or curricula. Finally, a wider convergence as to its interpretation should be sought.

The unfortunate expression “comics” for a medium that is never just funny or amusing in itself, has contributed considerably to the ambiguity of its definition and the perception of the sequential art (Eisner 1985: 5) in general. Distinguishing between the full range of possibilities comics offer in connection with form and content, artistic value and readership could be a first step for a deeper understanding of this medium. Indeed, this has been the objective behind the translation of Joe Sacco’s “Safe Area Gorazde. The War in Eastern Bosnia 1992-95”, in which the author combines the techniques of eye witness reportage with the medium of comic-book story telling, giving a “colourful” account in black and white of life during the Balkan conflict. Besides the need for an effective management of the restraints posed by the coexistence of words and images in the source text, the translator’s challenge has been to render the synergetic impact of the informative and expressive function of the original text in the target text, by switching between a semantic and a communicative approach to translation. The semantic allows the individual and creative traits of the author’s work to be duly preserved, while the communicative accounts for the systematic handling of the lexicon, syntax, style and structure in response to the writer’s communicative intent. The particular “hybrid nature” of Joe Sacco’s story has called for aesthetically calibrated choices between internal and external text factors throughout the entire translation process, the final result of which shows how Christiane Nord’s text analysis and translation theory can be of great assistance to the translator.

Seemingly, the translation industry does not follow the laws regulating economic activities. This is supposedly due to an information asymmetry affecting pricing mechanisms: clients and vendors lack the information necessary to evaluate transaction costs. Most often, clients are hardly able to express their service requirements, as their competences are typically inadequate for a proper evaluation of any service added value. This leads clients to look at translation services as a cost to cut rather than as an investment whose return can bemeasured. Consequently, vendors tend tomaximize short-termprofits by cutting their production costs dramatically. Reverse auctions are the direct effect of this situation. They are the best mechanism to assign a translation job when price is the only metric. Auctions are a typical tool in a market affected by a phenomenon commonly known as commoditization. In this scenario, quality is a “unique selling proposition”, a deceptive differential. To prevent price from being the only measure, both clients and vendors should opt for service level agreements (SLAs). Clients must provide detailed requirements, while vendors must follow measurable and verifiable production processes according to commonly acknowledged standards. This demands a process-oriented approach to business, which is still rather rare.

The aim of this paper is to provide a brief overview of computer-assisted translation (CAT) and to describe an approach to training beginners at undergraduate level. A general introduction will first explain some terminological issues and present the main modules of current CAT tools as well as their usage requirements. The role played by CAT tools for language professionals will then be discussed on the basis of the findings from a recent survey. The paper will go on to describe a possible method for training beginners in using CAT. The workshop held on this topic at the SSLMIT of Trieste in May 2006 will serve as a reference. Some initial comments will be devoted to the workshop objectives and overall structure before outlining the main topics covered in the introductory as well as in the hands-on part of the workshop. The description will focus on the choices made in the workshop planning, with particular reference to the hands-on experience. Finally, the results of a survey conducted among the participants will be presented in order to underline their interest on this topic.

This paper presents a teaching/learning experience of translation on tourism organized around an authentic assignment aimed at developing a professional approach to this activity. Although the academic context where it took place does not actively pursue this learning outcome, the local labour market strongly requires quality translation services, especially the labour-intensive tourist sector. The features of the source text to be translated, together with the teaching activities carried out, contributed to raising the students’ awareness of a number of the behaviours and procedures that can prove empowering for a fruitful application of their language and translation skills upon graduation

With the rise of the mass media and the information society, the number and circulation of translated texts – especially from English – have increased remarkably over the past half-century. In particular, there has been a considerable increase over the current decade in the number of translated articles from foreign newspapers and magazines published in the Italian press. Like translated popular literature or film and TV dubbing, this trend in the press is significant given the impact of covert translations on the acceptance of specific language structures by the Italian-speaking community. This article therefore illustrates the difficulties and research prospects deriving from the creation of a large corpus of translated articles which may be used to conduct computational analyses aimed at ascertaining the formal features of translations compared to articles originally written in Italian. In addition to contributing to the description of the language traits used in the press, this study should prove useful for the training of prospective translators.

The present article dwells upon several linguistic considerations, which arose during the translation of the novel Balerina, balerina: kratki roman written by Marko Sosic, one of the greatest representatives of the Slovene cultural panorama in Italy. The interest towards the novel was nourished by his particular style, and most of all by the different linguistic varieties used by the author, which accurately reproduce the multilingual situation characterizing the Slovene community in Italy. All of these factors required a very complex approach to translation. The paper focuses on the translation process, sociolinguistics, and, in particular, questions regarding the Italian language varieties to be used to reproduce the routine communication code of those who belong to the Slovene community. The problems of adopting a single translation method aimed at mirroring the complexity of those linguistic varieties is discussed, a long discussion of the inevitable loss in the passage from one language to the other. The paper concludes questioning the utility of the theoretical concept of equivalence in translation.

This article is a first-hand presentation of the history, the activities and the current developments of the Steunpunt Literair Vertalen (Literary Translation Support Office), which operates a coordinated training programme aimed at improving the linguistic skills of would-be as well as experienced translators. The Support Office is a co-operative venture involving the University of Utrecht and the Lessius Hogeschool in Antwerp and sponsored by the Nederlandse Taalunie (Dutch Language Union). Among other activities, the Steunpunt organized a successful summer course on literary translation held at the Lessius Hogeschool in Antwerp aimed at improving the skills of young literary translators from Dutch into Italian. The first two authors of this contribution,in fact, were selected as young translators for the training and the seminars held during that course, while Paris was involved as an experienced teacher and translator in the development of the linguistic skills of the participants. In giving their presentation, the authors focus in particular on their experience during the 2006 summer course.