Rivista internazionale di tecnica della traduzione n.23 - 2021

During the last twenty years, in particular at the lexical level, the study of the history of the Italian language has benefited greatly from corpora including literary texts, such as “Letteratura Italiana Zanichelli” or “Biblioteca Italiana” (and, perspectively, the Italian section of the ELTeC - European Literary Text Collection). However, those corpora were compiled mainly according to the literary canon, and they include a small number of texts compared to the time span they are supposed to cover. Thus, they can provide a limited account of the evolution of literary Italian in time. Today, a large number of texts are available online (to begin with Google Books), covering a large time span and broad variety of genres. The analysis of such large corpora calls for suitable tools and approaches to ensure their effective distant reading. Consequently, the interdisciplinary cooperation of linguists, statisticians and academics of literature may lead to an innovative approach to the study of corpora to assess the evolution of literary language.

In this article the use of the Italian prefix s- is analyzed from the morphosyntactic and semantic point of view, in order to know the main equivalences of translation in Spanish in the various derivations. On being two Latin languages with different cognitive development along the time, we have found various contrastive aspects, that begin in the origins of the tongues and finish in the actual use. Among these aspects that define the different equivalences of this prefix s-, we must remark the origin, the cognitive competence of each culture and the high functionality of Italian prefixes.

The aim of this paper is to analyse some aspects of the prepositional system from a translatological and contrastive point of view between two related languages (Spanish/Italian). Mastering prepositions in a foreign language is an arduous task and undoubtedly contributes to linguistic improvement. The activity of translation can often be facilitated by linguistic proximity, but when dealing with the prepositional system, numerous dissymmetries can appear, the analysis of which is of the utmost importance in order to avoid linguistic calques and interferences, as well as to favour metalinguistic reflection on the different ways of expressing prepositions between two related languages. For our analysis, we will take into consideration the novel Caperucita en Manhattan by the Spanish writer Carmen Martín Gaite and its Italian translation carried out by Michela Finassi Parolo. The corpus created will allow us to carry out a cross-linguistic comparison in order to highlight the existing dissymmetries.

Metegol (2013) is the first real 3D animated feature film produced in Argentina, directed by the Oscar winner and film director Juan José Campanella, and loosely based on the book by the Argentinian writer Roberto Fontanarrosa, “Memorias de un wing derecho”. This paper compares the original version of the film with the Italian and peninsular Spanish dubbed versions. The analysis will focus on some scenes including evident features of the Argentinian variety of the Spanish language, with particular attention to the idiomatic locutions and to the lexis of lunfardo. The aim of this analysis is to show how these elements have been translated, adapted or neutralized in the two dubbed versions. Furthermore, the study will describe the way the target audience may influence the translation strategies adopted and will outline the features of audiovisual dubbed products addressed to children

In this article, we intend to reflect on the essential skills that all translators working in the legal field must possess, as well as to highlight the importance of discussing, analysing and reflecting on the mistakes that the student may have made. Understanding translation errors in the legal field seems to us to be a fundamental requirement for carrying out this translation task, as the legal content of these documents means that the seriousness of the error is greater than in other contexts. Likewise, in some sections, we have sought to highlight the value that the didactics of error can have when the pair of languages with which we are working share a certain linguistic affinity, as is the case of Spanish and Italian. In doing so, we have only intended to offer a brief reflection on the need to carry out more empirical studies on how to take advantage of error to solve problems of syntactic calques or false friends.

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 paper aims at comparing the outcomes of a Greek-Italian translation task between translation students and foreign language students. This study focuses both on a error-analysis in the target texts on different levels. Students at the Advanced School for Interpreters and Translators of the University of Trieste and students attending Greek courses at the Hellenic Foundation for Culture were asked to translate a short informational text using both paper and online dictionaries. The translated texts were then corrected and mistakes in meaning, morphology, lexicon and syntax were pointed out and compared using both a quantitative and a qualitative approach. Results suggest that translation students produced more accurate tranlations, mainly as far as semantics and lexicon are concerned.

This article concerns an example of statistical analysis of a large diachronic corpus, including 100 works of Italian fiction, with the aim of recognizing prototypical trends in words frequencies and identifying clusters of words that share similar temporal patterns. Starting from the insights of literary scholars, this study tries to test the hypothesis (often brought forward in literary history) that the inner life of the authors and/or their characters gained more importance during the Nineteenth century and represents one of the cornerstones of modernism. Although this hypothesis cannot be rejected, the adopted statistical methods do not highlight clear-cut temporal patterns: some slight trends emerge but a large share of words individually show an undifferentiated behaviour over time. The idea of studying the occurrence in the texts of the inner expression of the writers from a diachronic perspective is certainly very ambitious. This first experiment shows some strengths of the statistical tools but also some limits of the criteria adopted for both the constitution of the corpus and the selection of linguistic features to be observed.

The Italian gerundial structures have undergone opposite developments in the last century. The continuous periphrasis [andare or venire + gerund] was more frequent at the end of the 1800s, whereas the progressive structure [stare + gerund] increased sharply during the 1900s. Furthermore, some of its syntactic constraints have weakened and today it can include a broader range of verb tenses and actional values. Based on previous research, both qualitative and quantitative, this study analyses a corpus including novels written by Italian authors and translations from foreign languages into Italian dating from 1811-1896 and 1976- 2005. In addition to the overall figures, which confirm the dominant role of the continuous periphrases in literary language at the end of the 1900s, data suggest that translators anticipated the development of the gerundial periphrases in Italian in terms of the selection of auxiliary verbs and verb tenses.

Metaphors have been shown to be paramount in health communication in the light of their capacity to make concepts more concrete and, consequently, simple. In the wake of the #ReframeCovid initiative (2020) and similar researches, which highlighted the ubiquity and relevance of figurative language during the coronavirus pandemic, this paper aims at providing a qualitative analysis of metaphors in mass media content with respect to the search of a coronavirus vaccine. The analysis was conducted from a contrastive perspective in Italian, English, German, and Russian. It pinpoints the most frequent source domains of such metaphors and provides an overview of the contexts in which they are used, i.e. the aspects of this phenomenon they frame, through practical examples. Finally, some considerations are made with respect to issues connected to the use of some of these metaphors, also from the translatological viewpoint.

In an increasingly globalised world, with the need to communicate and trade quickly, machine translation has become more and more important. It helps both language professionals in their daily work, translators, and non-professionals to understand and create foreign language texts. The question of gender in language is still very topical and although it has been discussed a lot in translation theory, it still needs to be studied in the field of machine translation. In this paper we will observe through some examples deriving from political and journalistic discourse how two machine translation engines available on the market today, DeepL and Google Translator, translate gender in the Spanish-Italian linguistic combination.

This paper illustrates methods, tools, and preliminary results of a study aimed to create a list of job titles and analyze them in a corpus of 100 Italian canonical and non-canonical fictional prose works published between 1825 and 1923. Job titles are interesting because they reflect socio-economic changes, as well as giving important information on how literary settings and genres changed. After a short introduction on job titles, we will discuss tools and methods used for the creation of a list of words, data extraction, and data representation, both from a linguistic and programming point of view. Some preliminary results will be shown and discussed with a statistical approach: data do not suggest significant patterns over time: whereas job titles appear more or less consistent from a chronological point of view. Finally, some advantages and limitations will be examined. The goal of this study is to develop a set of tools and methods that can be easily reproduced to build complex lexical lists, find their items, and represent data for corpora of any genre and size in a simple and effective way.

Tourism was born from the human need to explore, knowing places, people and cultures. The tourist language is heterogeneous, and we can find it on a boundary line among other sectorial languages. The present work is based on an analysis of some aspects in the field of translation and lexicography of the sustainable tourism. Through a qualitative focalisation, we will focus on some linguistic and translatological characteristic from a contrastive point of view. The reference points will be some corpus like the “Official Portal of tourism of Spain” (“Portal Oficial de turismo de España”) (http://www.spain.info/es/), Cometval, the beginning of monolingual (DRAE and Keys) and bilingual (Laura Tam) dictionaries. We will highlight some culturemas that can give problems at the moment in which they will be translated from spanish to italian (alfajores, monas de Pascua, etc.) and from Italian to Spanish (like, for example, “peperoni cruschi”, “Tartellate”, etc.). The goal is to establish some useful instruments for the translation in the professional field of the linguistic and cultural mediation. The linguistic and cultural mediator transmits intercultural knowledges to ease the linguistic exchange and to avoid misunderstandings during the communication. It neither deals with a simple and mere translation nor transfer and transmit unique and typical knowledges of a specific group that often does not own a conceptual and linguistic equivalent in the given language. For that reason, they come into play a series of translatological strategies and techniques to accomplish a grade of equivalence as much accurate as possible.

This study, which is part of the larger project COVIDisc - A focus on vector populations, sets out to analyse the media discourse in German and Italian-speaking Switzerland on the role of young people in the Covid-19 pandemic. After identifying the main lexical means used to refer to young people, the focus shifts to the syntactic functions and semantic roles in which they occur, as well as the deontic aspects of the discourse. Furthermore, a chronological analysis makes it possible to trace the construction of a common ground regarding the role of young people in the pandemic context. More specifically, it helps to identify deontic scenarios concerning the behaviours to be adopted or avoided, the actual compliance with the provisions issued by the authorities and the responsibility for raising awareness among young people. This data, reported and illustrated with a series of examples, will serve as a basis for future in-depth quantitative studies, which are essential for refining the interpretation of the trends that have emerged.