Rivista internazionale di tecnica della traduzione n.25 - 2023

This contribution unveils the outcomes of a research project undertaken in 2021 by the Dutch section of the University of Trieste, as a collaborative effort within the framework of the Dutch Literature in Translation international platform. The project's primary aim was the comprehensive analysis and comparative evaluation of the Italian, French, English, and German translations of Cees Nooteboom's novel Rituelen (1980). The focal point of this inquiry lies in the diverse translation strategies employed to convey culture-bound terms embedded in the source text. Moreover, the study involved a group of ten Italian students in Applied interlinguistic communication and Conference interpreting and solicited their insights regarding the translation choices concerning culture-bound terms in the Italian rendition. This article opens by focusing on literary translation as a form of cultural mediation and the translation of culture-bound terms and on Cees Nooteboom's work from a transnational point of view. Subsequently, the findings of our research project are exposed by focussing on the results related to two case studies: culture-bound terms that are linked to the history of the Netherlands and heterolingualism in the scrutinized novel. For each case study different translation techniques as well as students’ comments will be analysed in a transnational perspective.

Scientific activity is essentially an incessant dispute that aims to undermine established knowledge in favour of new knowledge, which proven and argued impose themselves to the detriment of the former. The accentuation of the dispute over knowledge took place to a greater extent with the emergence of the empirical sciences and their emancipation from the old scholastic knowledge rigidly controlled by the church, as Galilei, among others, demonstrates. He was one of the first to question the Ptolemaic system in favour of the Copernican system, and used his mother tongue, Italian, which offered him the possibility of expressing himself and arguing, more than Latin, which had until then been the unchallenged lingua franca of science. The translation into German of one of his most famous works, the Dialogo sopra i due massimi sistemi del mondo (1632) more than 250 years later (1891), presents numerous challenges, related both to diachrony and thus to the use of a language that is in part now obsolete, and to the truth value of its contents, which are now in part superseded by new knowledge. The translator exploits the linguistic resources of German to make interpretations, clarifications and modernisations of somewhat dated content, demonstrating the importance of multilingualism in scientific communication.

Instrumentality, a topic often mentioned in one and the same breath as agents and patients in thematic analyses, is rarely considered a linguistic element in its own right. In the context of everyday language use, instrumentality is a very broad concept and is illustrated frequently, be it overt or not. The purpose of this paper is to analyse the different linguistic typologies and patterns that underlie the expression of different instrumental roles in Dutch and Italian and the function of gestures in instrumentality. Paradigms originating from cognitive and construction grammar are used to shed light on the processes that impact the expression and various typologies of instrumentality. This paper targets cut and break (C&B) verbs since they show particularly interesting characteristics. The analysis of a usage-based corpus, that consists of the free description of stimuli representing C&B events by native speakers, shows that instrumentality can assume almost all grammatical functions and is shown to be the result of joint meaning-construction between two participants in search of shared assumptions.

This paper explores some aspects of Synax and Textual Grammar in the French and German Easy Language Version of the Swiss Bundesgesetz über die Beseitigung von Benachteiligungen von Menschen mit Behinderungen (BehiG; „Federal Act on the Elimination of Discrimination against People with Disabilities“). The study focuses on two main questions: How is linguistic complexity reduced? Do simplification strategies differ in the two languages? Special attention is paid to one of the main problems in translations into Easy Language, i.e. to unintentionally in-creasing complexity when trying to simplify. To answer the two questions, the wording in BehiG extracts is analysed and compared to the recommendations published in different Easy Language manuals, e.g. the Inclusion Europe standards or the German recommendations in Bredel/Maaß 2016b and Netzwerk Leichte Sprache.

This paper aims at investigating Toury's law of interference, which posits that translations tend to under-represent target language features and to over-represent source language ones, by means of corpus-based empirical study. More specifically, it aims at testing the influence of French, the working language of the Court of Justice of the European Union (CJEU), on the Spanish and Italian versions of the CJEU judgments. The analysis, carried out by comparing parallel corpora of judgments delivered by the CJEU (CSCG) and comparable corpora of non-translated texts issued by national judges (COSPE), provides an example of positive and negative transfer, namely the explicitation of the subject and the different frequency of use of complex prepositions. The results seem to confirm both instances of interference. As far as the positive transfer is concerned, since French is a non-pro-dop language – unlike Spanish and Italian –, more explicit subjects are actually found in European judgments. The differences in the frequency of phraseological patterns are seen as negative transfer: court translators tend to use complex prepositions resembling French ones rather than those traditionally used in national judgments. This paper yields interesting results which confirm the law of interference and suggest further investigation on the overlapping of different translation universals detected in CJEU judgments.

Like many Near Eastern people, I grew up dreaming of peace and dignity, conveyed by the voice of the Lebanese diva Fairuz singing the Rahbani Brothers’ masterpieces, challenging weapons, enmity and war, claiming justice, peace and love. A long time has passed since I left Lebanon, carrying away with me a dreamed homeland, hardly recognizable nowadays, a treasure I have jealously guarded thanks to our theatrical and musical heritage. In that heritage, East meets West, claiming respect for Lebanese identity, popular traditions and folktales, music and dances, sung dialogues and genuine linguistic expressions. In that heritage, the oppressed defeat their oppressors and love transcends all boundaries. While the Rahbani Brothers’ theatre was conceived and performed in colloquial Lebanese, most of the research on the topic carried out so far is in Arabic and their works have become vulnerable to misrepresentations by Western scholars. For all these reasons, I decided to venture into illustrating and partially translating their plays. The operetta that I present here is a Rahbanian Romeo and Juliet that joyfully overturns the destiny of two lovers suffering as a consequence of the never ending arguments between their families.

The project SELSI (Spoken Easy Language for Social Inclusion), launched in 2022, focuses on simplifying language in oral contexts. Its objective is to develop adaptable recommendations for professionals to produce comprehensible content for co-participants requiring linguistic support. This paper presents findings from a SELSI survey assessing the needs and preferences of speakers across proficiency levels in oral contexts. The results highlight the necessity of non-linguistic elements in effective oral communication, including factors like a quiet setting, empathetic environments, a close rapport between interlocutors, and the strategic use of repetition to elicit of accurate comprehension judgements.

Studies on Turkish elements in European languages are quite numerous and concern in particular the languages of southeastern Europe, which was subjected to Ottoman rule for centuries with obvious linguistic consequences, while influences on other languages, such as Polish and Russian, have also been investigated. Wolfgang Schweickard has provided a comprehensive overview of this impact. On the other hand, various other languages, including Slovak, have so far been all but ignored by scholars. The present article attempts to offer a first, small contribution to fill this gap, making use of the large historical dictionary of the Slovak language (HSSJ), which covers the period from the 11th to the 18th century. Based on a perusal of this work, we have identified a number of words of Ottoman-Turkish origin that we examine here, establishing, where possible, their routes of penetration into Slovak and their particular features. For each lemma, we also provide details of the original Turkish-Ottoman source and any relevant spoken variations, together with the main bibliographical references.

The idea of using peer feedback in second language writing classes is not new and dates to the 1980s. Despite the abundant evidence supporting the integration of peer review into L2 writing courses, it was not before the outburst of the Covid-19 pandemic that this activity was incorporated in the Academic English module (AEM) module for PhD students at the University of Trieste. This paper adopts a reflective teaching perspective to report on a case study in which peer review of students’ abstracts was introduced as a ‘new’ teaching technique in the AEM delivered online due to the pandemic. Based on the responses to two questionnaires, this paper illustrates how the students tackled two peer review tasks and examines the participants’ attitudes and feedback, with the aims of stimulating a critical reflection on the experience and formulating concrete plans to make peer review an integral part of future Academic English modules.

Exploring language simplification and intralingual translation: insights, results and desiderata. Rivista Internazionale di Tecnica della Traduzione (RITT) The Rivista Internazionale di Tecnica della Traduzione – International Journal of Translation of the IUSLIT Department and Scuola Superiore di Lingue Moderne per Interpreti e Traduttori, University of Trieste aims at providing a forum of discussion for the multifaceted activity of translation and related issues.

This paper explores translation trainees’ attitudes toward MT in terms of trust and reli¬ance. The data were collected within the LeMaTTT project, an empirical investigation of the potential impact of neural machine translation (NMT) on the development of info-mining and thematic competences in legal translator trainees. The sample con¬sisted of MA-level trainees with different educational backgrounds. Besides complet¬ing either a post-editing or a from-scratch translation task, they responded to a pre- and a post-task questionnaire investigating whether and how they use MT for specialised translation tasks and their trust in and perception of its output. The analysis considers within- and cross-group tendencies and takes account of the differences in (a) the types of tasks and (b) the participants’ experience and training in specialised translation and post-editing. The trends concerning the use and perception of MT are also correlated with perceived task difficulty and self-assessment, as reported in the questionnaires. Results suggest that MT is perceived as a reliable tool which speeds up the transla¬tion process and provides candidate terminological equivalents, though revision is re¬quired. It appears to generally reduce the perceived difficulty of the ST while increas¬ing the perceived quality of the TT in less experienced and competent trainees.

This paper discusses results from an Erasmus+ project called SELSI aimed to identify needs and strategies for linguistic support in Spoken Easy Language. It focuses on data collected in Italy among professionals who work with individuals needing linguistic simplification and on users who need simplified language themselves. More specifically, this study addresses both linguistic and non-linguistic aspects that are crucial for supporting the development of communication through Easy Language, e.g. textual and conversation-enhancing strategies, linguistic strategies, listener-engaging strategies and the use of multimodal materials. The strategies discussed include the use of signpost language as a means to scaffold different textual parts and clarify the logical and semantic relations, the potential of metaphors for simplifying more abstract and potentially challenging concepts, the potential of interpersonal linguistic options and the use of multimodal resources for the creation of multisensory environments that support literacy development. Overall, it will be argued, the data collected from professionals and from users exhibit a strong alignment: with very few exceptions, the strategies frequently employed by professionals coincide with the ones users find highly beneficial or helpful. These findings suggest that professionals employing Easy Language are presently headed in a positive direction, although they do highlight areas for potential future enhancements.