Rivista internazionale di tecnica della traduzione n.12 - 2010

This paper deals with the analysis of some “statuti sociali” of Italian “società per azioni”, on the one hand, and, on the other, some Articles of Association of British Public Limited Companies. First, the main similarities and differences between documents originally written in Italian and in English are described with special reference to some lexical, syntactic and textual elements. Then the English translations of Italian texts are analysed and compared with native English texts in order to provide translators with both theoretical knowledge and some practical information which could be useful when translating this kind of legal documents. This intralinguistic analysis concentrates on some aspects of particular interest from a translation point of view, such as sentence structure, subordination, nominal and verbal style, use of modal verbs, lexical repetition and anaphoric reference, as well as some other lexical aspects. The preliminary results seem to confirm both Toury’s law of interference and Baker’s translation universals of simplification and explicitation. Analisi di alcuni statuti sociali di S.p.A. e Articles of Association di P.L.C.: lessico, morfosintassi e testualità1 Valentina Miotto Università di Trieste Analisi di alcuni statuti sociali di S.p.A.

This essay considers Camillo Sbarbaro’s translation of L’Intersigne, a fantasy tale written by Villiers de l’Isle-Adam in 1867 dealing with the weird experience of the narrator in a Breton presbytery, which cannot definitively be categorized as a dream or a hallucination. In Sbarbaro’s text the narrative of this oneiric experience tends towards a rewriting that minimizes or even standardizes the narratological features of the original, which was intended to have a dream-effect on readers. However this loss is compensated by a gain in terms of intertextuality, since, especially in descriptive or lyrical passages, the personal voice of the translator – himself a well-known poet – creates meaningful intertextual echoes for Italian readers.

The aim of this paper is to provide an overview of a translation project, carried out with an innovative approach to computer translation: the combined use of machine translation systems and translation memory tools. The text Osnovy primenenija technologij komp’juternych perevodov (CAT technologij), Càast 1, a handbook about computer translation tools, has been collaboratively translated by two students as their dissertations in the field of translational studies. This collaboration was made possible by the combined use of the HAMT and MAHT systems. The paper begins with a presentation of the various types of computer translation tools on the market, and a description of their key role in the translation process. It then continues with an explanation of the combined use of computer translation technologies and the advantages their use provides to the translator. The core of the paper is dedicated to a detailed description of the translation process applied to the text of the manual. After a short preamble about the type of text being translated, every single phase (terminology extraction, automatic translation with HAMT systems, creation of a translation memory, post-editing) is explained with the help of schematics. The paper ends with some conclusions about the overall experience.

This paper aims at presenting the results of a terminographic work on criminal preliminary investigation in Spain and in Italy through the theoretical framework of Sociocognitive Terminology (Temmerman 2000). The analysis has revealed a significant anisomorphism in the conceptual organization of the structure and procedure of criminal trials in the two countries, which entailed challenging problems of terminological equivalence. These were dealt with through the prism of the sociocognitive approach. From a methodological point of view, the study is based on the notion of Temmerman’s “template of understanding”, a tool that is particularly suitable to cope with vague and flexible units of understanding typical of the Criminal Procedure of both countries. Temmerman’s approach has proved to be particularly apt for legal terminology: prototypically structured categories are an invaluable means of enhancing the conceptualization of the inevitable gaps and asymmetries between the two frames, i.e. the two legal systems. The paper applies this methodology to a select number of terminographic units, by focusing on the crucial role of Temmerman’s template categories in the identification of terminological equivalents.

The aim of the present research is to examine the impact of recent technological developments in machine translation (MT) in the language industry. The objectives are: 1. To define the value of MT in terms of suitability and convenience in meeting expressed requirements in those cases where MT is demanded; 2. To examine the potential increase in productivity through a conscious use of the tool; 3. To analyse those activities aimed at satisfying the customer’s explicit and implicit needs with MT. The use of MT is a matter of fact, and it deserves serious attention: its advantages and disadvantages can be outlined only by looking at translation as an inherently economic activity and by considering MT more for its potential, than for its limits. The evaluation of MT needs to be focused on functionality and economic utility, while quality assessment methods for human translation and for MT Need to be considered separately and in a more functional perspective. MT needs to be seen no longer as a ‘one-size-fits-all’ solution but as a means to differentiate services and to satisfy expressed needs. Suppliers need to adjust their idea of quality to that of customers, for whom the highest quality isn’t always the only demand.

In recent years years, contrastive linguistics studies involving Spanish and Italian have focussed particularly on discourse markers and their translation. This paper is aimed at investigating how discourse markers included in newspaper articles written in Spanish were translated into Italian for publication in three newspapers distributed at national level (Corriere della Sera, La Repubblica and L’Unità). 76 discourse markers occurring 493 times were considered. The analysis showed that they tend to be omitted in the translation process into Italian (264 occurrences were translated, 229 were omitted). This may be explained not only with reference to the need for producing texts characterized by brevity, such as newspaper articles, but also to the limited importance attached to the translation of discourse markers in general.

This article is an approach to outline some of the linguistic characteristics of a specialized area of legal Italian (company and commercial law). Based on the data of a parallel corpus made by the Articles of Association of an Italian Public Limited Company and the German translation, it demonstrates the main competences the translator needs to master in order to transport the source text messages in the target language. The comparative analysis will serve to inform on the main lexical and morpho-syntactic structures of the Italian statuto by presenting some translation techniques proposed by the author in this regard. It should be pointed out that the article does not intend to prescribe any “ideal” translation of the source text.

The article focuses on nominalization as grammatical metaphor and on its translation from Italian to Slovene. It would seem that grammatical metaphor is more frequent in certain languages than in others. With the use of Italian and Slovene monolingual corpora and especially with the aid of an Italian-Slovene parallel corpus, this hypothesis has been tested and other related phenomena have been analysed, such as the different distribution of nominalizations in different text types and the influence of lexical density on the acceptability of a translation. After a brief definition of nominalization, a study on the frequency of nominalization in the FIDA and La Repubblica corpora is presented. The results are compared with an analysis of the frequency of nominalization in the Italian-Slovene parallel corpus ISPAC. Afterwards, the presence of nominalization is also verified in the two sub-corpora of ISPAC, containing literary and non-literary texts, in order to assess the results against the hypothesis that, historically, the origins of grammatical metaphor lie in the emergence of scientific discourse. Next we concentrate on the element of lexical density and its influence on the acceptability of Slovene translations compared to original texts. The difficulty of translating texts loaded with nominalizations in Slovene is aggravated by the frequent use, in Italian, of non-finite verb forms, which constitute another problematic area in translation. Finally, the strategies used by the translators of the texts collected in the ISPAC corpus are analysed. Apart from the most straightforward version with a nominalization being translated as a nominalization, a congruent translation (i.e. one using a verb to realize a process) of a metaphorically worded process in Italian is the most common option, while there are also several other possibilities that seem to occur regularly, such as adjectival or adverbial metaphorical realizations.

Lo studio si propone di analizzare la traduzione di una particolare categoria di elementi coesivi, i connettori interfrasali, in un corpus di articoli di argomento economico tratti da quotidiani e riviste specializzate tradotti dall’inglese in italiano. Lo studio mette in rapporto i risultati sulla frequenza dei connettori con quelli derivanti dall’analisi di un corpus comparabile di articoli scritti originariamente in italiano. Soffermandosi in particolare sui casi di esplicitazione traduttiva tramite l’inserimento di connettori non presenti nel testo di partenza, lo studio conclude che tale esplicitazione può, da un lato, essere collegata al tentativo dei traduttori di uniformarsi a una norma di produzione testuale tipica dell’italiano e, dall’altro, essere considerata come spia del processo di decodifica dell’informazione (spesso di carattere specialistico) veicolata dall’originale.

The present study considers terminological variation from a bilingual perspective by analysing a parallel corpus made of EU texts in English and Italian concerning the criminal law subfield of crime victims. After providing a brief chronological overview of different terminological schools of thought questioning the univocity principle postulated by the traditional theory of terminology, the paper introduces denominative variation, i.e. the linguistic phenomenon in which different denominations are used to refer to the same concept (Freixa 2006). The aim of the paper is to present a case study on a specific form of denominative variation, i.e. horizontal denominative variation, which consists of the coexistence of more than one designation for the same concept in a set of texts which are to be considered homogeneous as regards their degree of specialization, and to propose a tentative classification of the horizontal denominative variants extracted from the corpus.

This analysis compares the language used in a corpus of comics translated from English into Italian with the language of a corpus of comics originally written in Italian. The starting point is the assumption that the language of comics tends to imitate spoken language. An analysis is conducted at textual, syntactic, morphological and lexical level to identify the registers used in both corpora and establish whether traits emerge which may be related to translation universals.

This paper investigates differences in the language of articles published in Italian newspapers translated from foreign languages compared to the language of articles originally written in Italian. To this end, a corpus was compiled of approximately 1.9 million tokens composed of two subcorpora (translated and original) weighted according to different criteria (length and number of articles, distribution in time, number of authors/translators). By means of text analysis software, analyses were conducted to identify language traits related to source language interference and translation universals. Although the combined influence of source language, translation universals and stylistic conventions of the text genre under scrutiny makes it difficult to attribute findings to a specific factor, it seems clear that translators are less subject to the influence of English and the innovative traits of contemporary Italian than is the case for journalists.

There is much evidence showing that Moliere did not write his plays. In France, during the 17th century, comedies were presented by comedians – like Molière – and not by the authors who wrote them. Molière did not behave as an author and none, among his contemporaries, considered him a writer. In contrast, many claimed that Corneille wrote some of these plays. Those claims are confirmed by several statistical indices: intertextual distance, classifications, combinations of common words, meanings of keywords, sentence length.

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.

Being of utmost importance in ensuring the quality of translation services, the process of revision is gaining an increasing interest among professionals and academics alike. Thus the potentially never-ending process of improving the quality of a translated text is being closely studied in order to identify clearly the tasks of the reviser and his/her ideal professional profile, as well as to minimize costs. This paper aims to contribute to the study of revision by looking at the revisions implemented in the English-to-Italian translation of a textbook on macroeconomics. In order to classify and quantify the changes made to the translation by the reviser, ad hoc revision parameters have been devised by integrating two existing typologies of revisions (Rega 1999; Mossop 2007). On the basis of raw quantitative data relating to the different types of revisions, some tentative conclusions on the quality of the revision as well as on the role and expertise of the reviser are finally drawn.

The present paper aims at illustrating the construction of a corpus of regional newspapers, with a particular focus on the Segusinum corpus, a tool developed at the University of Turin. The main objective of the project is to fill the gap of local newspaper corpora in Italian linguistics and, more specifically, to provide a methodological solution not only for regional sources but also for corpora of journalistic language in general.