Rivista internazionale di tecnica della traduzione n.15 - 2013

This paper analyses the issue of Culture-Bound Elements (CBE) and their rendition in simultaneous interpretation. It focuses on the 2012 US Presidential Debates between the democratic President Barack Obama and the republican candidate Mitt Romney. The analysed interpretations were provided by four television channels which aired the debates live: RaiNews24 and SkyTG24 in Italy, Canal24Horas in Spain and the Spanish-speaking broadcasting company Univisión in the USA. All the video material was transcribed and added to CorIT, the Television Interpreting Corpus of the University of Trieste. The paper begins with a discussion of the features of media interpreting compared to conference interpreting. The second part discusses the importance of culture in shaping and understanding a message, culture- bound elements, their nature and the strategies that interpreters can adopt to deal with them. The third part presents the debates, the interpreting teams and the transcription process carried out. The fourth section offers the analysis of some examples of how the interpreters dealt with the CBEs in the case study. Finally, the last section contains statistical data on the strategies used by the four teams and the conclusions reached on their overall success in dealing with CBEs.

The translation of the Italian Code of Criminal Procedure into English, published in 2014, represents a way of explaining the functioning of the Italian criminal procedure to a wide English-speaking audience. Given the different varieties of English available, the translation team chose European English as the target language of the translation. After a brief overview of the central role played by English in the European supranational and international context, the paper presents a classification of translation equivalents used for the translation of the Code and illustrates it by concrete examples. Such classification is based on two criteria, namely the availability of European English translation equivalents in the reference corpus of European documents used by the translation team and the degree of embeddedness of the underlying concept in the national legal system. The resulting classification is threefold and comprises European English translation equivalents for Italian terms designating legal concepts shared by both national and supranational/international legal systems, European English translation equivalents for Italian terms designating legal concepts embedded in the national legal system only, and Italian terms designating legal concepts embedded in the national legal system with no European English translation equivalent.

This paper reports the results of a longitudinal empirical study on the acquisition of translation competence as concerns technical translation. The study comprised the assignment of two different translations of a number of extracts from a snowmobile service manual administered to translator trainees at an interval of a month. The first task was followed by a seminar on technical translation focused on a genre analysis of instructional documents and aimed at providing guidelines to produce better translations. On the basis of the relevant literature and the analysis of a small-scale corpus of automotive instruction manuals originally written in Italian, the target texts were assessed in terms of syntactic structure and Iconic Linkage. Finally, a relation between the translations’ usability and their overall quality is investigated.

The following article will analyse some particular cases of Albanian Turkisms, also compared with Turkisms in other languages of the Balkans. The topics that will be dealt with are the following: morphemic induction, hybrid compounds, calques on Turkish expressions, possible Turkisms that probably entered after the fall of the Ottoman Empire, folk etymology, morphological adaptation, interference of Turkisms between languages of the Balkans and some other particular cases regarding Albanian and other Balkan Turkisms.

This article deals with the complex relationship between intertextuality and translation, analyzed not only from a theoretical point of view, but also by adopting an empirical approach through the study of some intertextual phenomena observed in one of Hélène Cixous’ works, Manhattan. Lettres de la préhistoire. After an overview on the concept of intertextuality, which was introduced in the Sixties by structuralist critics, and a section about the different ways of conceiving the connections between intertextual references and translation (translation as a characteristic feature of the source text or as a form of intertextuality par excellence), the paper will present some strategies that the translator can resort to in order to forestall, or at least to reduce, the inevitable meaning loss and to guarantee an appropriate output. For example, we will mention literal translation, the use of paratextual elements, the substitution or even the deletion of intertextual references. Finally, we will consider some cases of intertextual references contained in Cixous’ text, in order to illustrate, on the one hand, the choices that the translator has taken during his work and, on the other, underline the importance of these references within the framework of Manhattan.

Studies in the history and criticism of translation in Italy have not been complemented by a systematic analysis of works translated in the 1800s; however, the availability of bibliographical surveys is a prerequisite for compiling corpora suitable for analysing a large amount of homogeneous documents, especially when the aim is to study the specific features of translated Italian. This gap is even more surprising as the 19th century marks a turning point in translation practice, with the technological progress in the publishing sector helping to meet the needs of the booming cultural market and establishing the novel as the dominant literary genre in Europe. Furthermore, this trend proceeded in parallel with Italy’s difficult transition towards political, linguistic and cultural unity. This article illustrates the preliminary results of a survey conducted on the Catalogo dei libri italiani dell’Ottocento (CLIO) for the 1880-1889 period. The distribution of translations was assessed in terms of language pairs, geographical circulation and genres. Although data need to be cross-checked with other bibliographical data banks and additional surveys in individual libraries, this approach may be implemented to investigate different aspects of translation practice in the 1800s.

This paper describes the CorIT (Corpus of Television Interpreting) project by Straniero Sergio & Falbo (Straniero Sergio, 2007; Falbo, 2009, 2012; Straniero Sergio & Falbo, 2012) and gives an account of a series of studies on television interpreting conducted on CorIT data, both by analysts and MA students of the SSLMIT of the University of Trieste. After a brief introduction (cf. 1), an illustration of Corpus-based interpreting studies (CIS) and the relevant methodological framework is provided (cf. 2), with special attention devoted to the latest developments present in the literature. In the following section (cf. 3) the focus shifts to CorIT, its main features and classification criteria. The final section (cf. 4) illustrates a series of investigations conducted on CorIT, from the point of view of the main research perspectives and research methods applied to CorIT data. By firstly illustrating the data collected in CorIT and the applied classification criteria, and subsequently providing an account of the broad range of issues investigated within the project, the paper aims at highlighting the great potential of research conducted on television interpreting performances with the corpusbased approach, especially from the point of view of data comparability and ecological validity.

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.

The present paper is mainly addressed to interpreting scholars who wish to focus their studies on the argumentative specificities of source texts (STs). Even though the argumentation analysis of STs for interpreting purposes is a barely charted sea, the practice is likely to become increasingly popular, in the light of its hermeneutical and contrastive functions providing invaluable insights into ST pragmatics (Marzocchi, 1998: 8), with significant implications for interpreter training (Marzocchi, 1994: 64; Marzocchi, 1998: 5). The application of argumentation concepts and methods to interpreting research, however, raises serious relevance issues. In this respect, the present paper proposes a sifting of the main argumentation theories so as to prevent researchers concentrating on irrelevant and potentially dispersive methodologies. It is therefore conceived as a theoretical overview, a preliminary non-exhaustive map of the most influential argumentation theories spreading across Europe and the world, aiming at guiding the interpreting scholar into the intricate but fascinating “wood” of argumentation studies.

The study of status has so far received scant attention as a research topic in Interpreting Studies. Although several authors refer to conference interpreting as “one of the fairest and loftiest occupations in the world” (Herbert, 1952: 3), no empirical investigation has been carried out so far to assess the validity of the myths attached to the profession. Even though the majority of studies have focused almost exclusively on the status of translators, an empirical study carried out by Dam and Zethsen (2013) revealed that conference interpreters do not place themselves at the top of the status continuum, which means that conference interpreters’ considerations on status do not correspond to the assumptions found in literature about the high standing of the interpreting profession. This paper illustrates the findings of a global survey addressed to conference interpreters worldwide, filled out by 803 respondents, whose objective was to assess how conference interpreters perceive their occupational status and how they believe that conference interpreting is regarded in society. The theoretical framework draws insights from Social Theory and the Sociology of the Professions, which seek to shed light both on interpreters’ self-perception of their work and on how the profession is socially represented.

This paper investigates the vocabulary used by novice vs. more experienced translators from a longitudinal perspective, so as to describe its nature, distribution and evolution. Data have been gathered in the framework of an empirical longitudinal product-oriented study which investigates the development of translation competence in a sample of novice and (more) experienced translators, whose performances are monitored over three years. Thanks to the specific research design adopted, the variables under investigation can be analysed both synchronically and diachronically, so that any discrepancies in the nature and distribution of the vocabulary used by novices vs. professionals can be observed. Such twofold perspective allows for a thorough investigation of the nature of translators’ vocabulary and its evolution as they gain experience and expertise. Finally, a possible relation between the textual trends observed in more experienced translators as opposed to novices and the participants’ assumed level of competence will be suggested.

Some non-professional subtitling communities have succeeded in tailoring structures where newcomers learn from their peers using collaboration as a key to develop the necessary skills. These environments are compatible with the collaborative translator-training environment promoted by the social constructivist approach. This study intends to shed light on how non-professional collaborative environments could be used in translator training. An experiment was carried out in 2013 using Amara and aRGENTeaM, two non-professional subtitling communities, as training environments for seventeen undergraduate students of translation at the Universitat Rovira i Virgili in Tarragona, Spain. Each student was asked to translate for both Amara and aRGENTeaM, and to adapt to their translation guidelines and time constraints. The data was collected over three weeks. Questionnaires were designed to collect data on the participants’ opinions regarding non-professional subtitling and its quality, the participants’ attitude towards the phenomenon and the possibility of using these environments for translator training. Results show that participants see non-professional translation activities as engaging projects that could provide them with skills they will need in the future if they decide to become translators.