Rivista internazionale di tecnica della traduzione n.21 - 2019

Literary retranslation, as a product and as a process, is one of the most interesting topics within the branches of Descriptive Translation Studies and Translation Criticism, allowing scholars to gain insights into the various factors – linguistic, socio-cultural and ideological – that determine changes in translation norms and strategies over time. However, despite the existence of an ever-growing number of case studies focusing on the retranslations of literary texts, extensive research is still needed to pin down the manifold influences behind this complex phenomenon. This article briefly discusses some examples of retranslation into Italian of English and American “classics” in the light of a number of theoretical hypotheses on the nature of editorial retranslation, trying to draw attention to its economic and ethical implications.

The fact of considering the legal language as a language at hand of everyone is the base of this study. In order to that we have studied the lexicon of three novels of Gianrico Carofiglio belonging to the first decade of the new millenium, making a selection of the Italian lexical units and their combinations and at the same time contrasting their use with the Spanish language with reference to the translation. In our study we have insisted on the importance of the subjectification in the creation of a lexicon of use and on its validity for a legal dictionary.

The EU project ADLAB PRO has been devised with the main aim of creating free-access, flexible, didactic materials of a modular and customizable nature for the training of an extremely important yet little known professional figure with a key role in the field of media accessibility: the audio describer. One of the most important and challenging stages of the construction of the ADLAB PRO course curriculum for expert audio description professionals has been the attribution of ECTS and ECVETS to each of its educational components. ECTS and ECVETS attribution is in fact crucial when producing a course that aims at being transparent and easily recognized in formal and informal education and training systems. In this paper, the process of ECTS and ECVET attribution to the ADLAB PRO course is described in detail and it is complemented by general reflections on the role of accreditation. Besides affecting directly prospective trainer and trainees interested in audio description and the audiovisual translation market, this paper contributes as possible reference for the growing number of EU projects that nowadays set curriculum design as their main goal.

This contribution seeks to analyse the complex and fascinating translation process of Abdelkader Benali’s award-winning novel De Langverwachte (Vassallucci 2003) into Italian. Due to a combination of professional and personal circumstances, Benali gave the Italian translator Claudia Di Palermo the total freedom to edit the novel. For example, the Italian translation, La Lunga Attesa (Fazi 2005), underwent an editing process in which, among other things, the number of chapters was reduced from 58 to 47. In the analysis, the profiles of the author and the translator will first be outlined. Subsequently, the most important reasons for the editing process will be explained on the basis of an interview with the translator. Finally, the four translation strategies are explained by referring to Di Palermo’s personal notes. These are: separation, merging, deletion and addition.

Among the translators from Spanish active in the 17th century, a leading role was played by Lorenzo Franciosini, the grammarian, lexicographer and author of the first translation of El Quijote into Italian. The original text by Cervantes was compared with Franciosini’s translation, whose first part was published in 1622, to evaluate a range of translational choices and their rationale. Broadly speaking, Franciosini’s translation can be considered reliable, a few mistakes emerge deriving from inaccuracies and miscomprehensions. This study only focuses on the ninth and tenth chapters of part one, pending further investigation on the remaining text.

With this study on the translation of Spanish verbal periphrases and verbal phrases that appear in Ojos que no ven (2010) by J. Á. González Sainz, a dense novel both thematically and in the use of these structures, I intend to present, starting from the analysis of the Spanish structures and its values, the possibilities of translation offered by Italian, taking account of the importance of the situational context as a reference in these constructions.

This paper focuses on the translation from Italian into Spanish of a complex linguistic phenomenon, namely verbs expressing the idea of change and transformation. In Italian the possibilities of expressing change are much more limited compared to Spanish where it is possible to adopt a variety of different verbs according to the nuances of the change. Based on a lexicographical approach, we will try to figure out to what extent bilingual dictionaries contribute to solving translation difficulties. In order to provide our paper with a robust methodology we will analyse the translation into Spanish of the novel Oceano mare (1993) by the Italian writer Alessandro Baricco. The analysis of the translation process will cast light upon this complex issue within the framework of Translation Studies between cognate languages.

This paper examines how the use of the term ‘interpreter/interprete’ – indicating the person who helps establishing communication between individuals facing linguistic barriers – has, in Italy, been integrated by the use of the word mediator/mediatore to refer to the person establishing communication in specific settings, manly in public service. The first reference to ‘mediators and mother tongue experts’ (mediatori ed esperti di madre lingua) can be found in a document of the Italian Education Ministry in 1990. The document stressed their importance to facilitate communication between schools and immigrant families. After a historical overview of the role of the interpreter, the introduction of the definitions ‘language mediator/mediatore linguistico’, ‘cultural mediator/mediatore culturale’ and ‘intercultural mediator/mediatore interculturale’ is analysed with special reference to the Italian academic system.

This paper illustrates the contents and teaching methods adopted for the Modern Greek language and translation courses at the Advanced School for Interpreters and Translators of the University of Trieste. The translation courses are based on mandatory grammar classes that help students take their first steps in modern Greek. Both BA and MA students have the possibility to attend the course which is divided into beginner, INTERMEDIATE and advanced levels. The students of the former reach an A2 level after the first year and deal with passive translation of tourism texts from Greek into Italian while the latter may reach a B2 level after the second year and a basic knowledge in active translation of commercial texts from Italian into Greek. Although Greek is one of the official languages of the European Union, it is taught in very few faculties for interpreters and translators. The main aim of this project is to change this trend, giving students the chance not only to learn a “niche language” but also to be able to add modern Greek as a working language for their future as translators or interpreters.

Even though traditional guided tours in museums are – to some extent – akin to audio description (AD), they fall short of making art and heritage sites fully accessible also to visually impaired people. As a full-fledged discipline and professional practice, AD can bridge this gap by providing auditory information that visually impaired museum-goers can use to successfully create a mental image o fan exhibit and thus live an authentic aesthetic and intellectual experience. The present article summarises the interaction between AD and tactile exploration and compares the two modalities in which AD is usually delivered: by a human guide or through a pre-recorded audio-guide. A final issue revolves around the need to rethink accessibility itself, adopting a holistic approach centred on the wider concept of social inclusion.

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.

Despite its superior status and prestige, and the rapid growth of its speakers in the last two decades, French speakers represent a minority because national languages remain the major languages of communication. The linguistic and cultural diversity of Burkina Faso justify the relevance of interlingual translation and communication for health. This article makes an inventory of interlingual translation and communication for health in Burkina Faso. Then, it analyzes some data on translation and communication in order to identify the obstacles to interlingual translation and health communication. Finally, it makes some recommendations that will enable effective interlingual translation and multilingual communication and thus contribute to improving the health of populations.

Yellow Submarine, the famous Beatles’ song was recorded in 1966. Two years later, thanks to the collaborative, creative effort of playwrights, poets, visual artists, musicians, actors, managers, etc. the jingle, mingled with the imagery of the concept album Sgt. Pepper Lonely Hearts Club Band, became a successful movie, and an icon of the psychedelic pop culture. The movie in turn engendered many other products such as graphic novels, picture books, pop-up books etc., forming a chain of adapted texts that have allowed the story to circulate intersemiotically into new media and forms. Moving from the description of the text metamorphosis, and from a general premise on translation as a transdisciplinary and mobile, highly constrained albeit creative activity, the paper focuses on the translational analysis of a new Italian version of the Beatles Yellow Submarine Picture Book, published by the writer of the essay. The puns, the cultural allusions, and particularly the hidden intertextual quotations of the Beatles songs, well known in their original language by most of the readers in the target culture, are a sort of unique, challenging translating problem, the solution of which might be found in a “Translating outside the box” strategy.

This paper focuses on the Albanian Turkisms found in an Italian-Albanian dictionary contained in a manuscript now kept in the library of the Greek Abbey of Grottaferrata. This codex is divided into two parts: the first, concerning the Albanian language, includes the dictionary I deal with, the second concerns the Turkish language. It was written by an anonymous Italian Franciscan friar in 1710, but many lexical glosses were added to it in 1805 by Raimondo di Roma, at that time Apostolic Prefect in Albania. The studies published so far on the Albanian dictionary of this codex ‒ Ismajli (1982), Landi (1988) ‒ are inadequate in several ways, including those parts dealing with words of Turkish origin. The analysis I present here tries to fill this gap and demonstrates that the dictionary of Grottaferrata gives an important contribution to historical-lexicographical research into Turkisms in the Albanian language.

The article deals with the difficulty of translating Italian action verbs into German. In an empirical study it tests how the online ontology IMAGACT can help in this process, compared to a traditional bilingual dictionary. The translation of these verbs is problematic because Italian, as an exocentric language, following the term suggested by the Danish research group TYPOlex, prefers to express actions in general verbs, whilst German, as an endocentric language, prefers precise verbs that contain the manner component. The ontology IMAGACT contains about 1010 prototypical actions represented by video animations and the corresponding verbs in around 20 languages. With their help, the translation of Italian general verbs into German and their acquisition by learners can be facilitated. In an experiment with 22 Italian German students, who were divided in two groups, one using a traditional bilingual dictionary, one using IMAGACT, it could be demonstrated that the IMAGACT-group performed significantly better in the translation of simple Italian sentences with a general verb into German. The limitation of the resource to verbs and its deliberately reduced microstructure was criticized by the students, but could be balanced easily by combining it with other online resources.

The analysis of a corpus of fictional prose written by Italian authors and translated from other languages between 1800 and 2005 sheds light on the use of the verb-clitic constructions termed verbi procomplementari. Since this class of verbs is typically found in oral texts and lower registers, their frequency may be expected to increase during the 1900s, when literary language becomes increasingly influenced by the median (i.e. between formal and informal) register of Italian known as italiano dell’uso medio. Furthermore, according to the tenets of Translation Universals (in particular, normalization and the Unique Items Hypothesis), translators may be expected to avoid the use of what can be considered an unconventional linguistic trait. The survey illustrated in this article confirms the first hypothesis; however, the widespread presence of verbi procomplementari in translations shows that translators play an innovative role in the history of Italian fictional prose.