Rivista internazionale di tecnica della traduzione n.11 - 2009

The aimof this paper is to investigate how Italian subtitlers cope with the translation of a non British or American variety of English among the many ‘New Englishes’ in the world; in this case ‘Jamaican English’, or rather, the language spoken on the island of Jamaica which is mainly Jamaican Creole. Examples are provided from the recently restored DVD version (2006) of the 1972 filmThe Harder They Come. The author focuses in particular on exploring cultural aspects as well as generic indicators to determine to what extent Jamaican values and cultural identity traits are linguistically and visually transferred through speech and song (reggae) to an Italian audience. Detail of research methodology is reported with exemplification of translation strategies taken from the discourses in amultimodal conceptual framework.

The present study aims at identifying the Italian and Anglo-American tourist gaze upon London, i.e. to show how London – one of the world’smost visited destinations – is perceived and described through language by Italian and Anglo-American tourists. To this purpose, a corpus of Italian and English travel blogs was created and used. The creation of a word frequency list of both corpora allowed us to identify four semantic categories of words – landmark sights/attractions; natural environment; food & drinks; andmeans of transport – corresponding to the different “faces” of London seen by the tourists. For each category, themost frequent and functional words (or groups of words) were considered and analysed to see how they are represented by the tourists of both cultures. The Italian and Anglo-American tourist gaze upon London were then compared and contrasted. The findings suggest that the differences between the two gazes find reason in different cultural backgrounds.

When translating Italian into Dutch, the translator has to face quite a few difficulties, due to differences in the language system of Italian and Dutch. One of these problems concerns the translation of the past Tenses. After having presented some major divergences in the temporal organisation of the verbs in both languages, we will present the findings of a contrastive study of La coscienza di Zeno by Italo Svevo and its Dutch translation by Jenny Tuin. The examples given and their analysis will point out some similarities and dissimilarities that should be taken into account when translating from Italian into Dutch and when teaching Italian to Dutch learners.

The paper has been inspired by a personal curiosity to study simultaneous interpreting fromArabic into Italian. On the basis of live-satellite simultaneous interpretations, the analysis focuses on a specific simultaneous interpretation element: the ear-voice span. This yardstick has been related to the unit of speech, that is to say the speaker’s part of speech corresponding to the interpreter’s silence, which is the starting point of the interpreter’s translation. All potential syntactic, semantic and pragmatic clues of the unit of speech have been taken into account during the study. Thanks to this procedure, the main elements determining the ear-voice span in the analysed simultaneous interpretations have been pointed out. The results of the paper show how ear-voice span – and the subsequent shaping of the unit of speech – is not strictly connected to and determined by Arabic syntax. Further non-syntactic elements may highly influence the length of the décalage. As a matter of fact, the importance of pragmatic and prosodic clues has been confirmed.

The aimof this article is threefold: first, a brief history of drama translation as exchange of dramatic texts will be outlined. Throughout the history of theatre, texts have crossed boundaries and helped to establish new systems, or have given new blood to old systems. Second, a terminological clarification will be given in order to dispel the confusion which has sometimes surrounded terms such as “drama translation”, “dramatic text”, “theatre translation” and “theatre text”. These terms have often been used interchangeably, but “drama translation” is not synonymous with “theatre translation”, as “dramatic text” is not with “theatre text”. Dramatic texts and theatre texts, in fact, function as objects or elements in different systems and are governed by different systemic conventions. Third, a survey of themajor theoretical contributions will be presented. Interest in drama translation from a theoretical point of view started in the late 1970s, with contemporary translation scholars initially highly influenced by semiotics.More recently, however, they have turned their attention to new, and perhapsmore profitable,means of investigation. From a cultural perspective, they have categorised specific translation strategies and used themto study the ways in which the discourse of foreign source texts is integrated in translation into the discourse of the target society.

The aim of this paper is to compare the contemporary English, Italian and German tourist gaze upon Puglia. To this purpose, three different corpora of travel articles have been assembled and analysed linguistically. The analysis of the variety of tourist gazes (Urry 2002) on Puglia has been useful to classify the English, Italian and German writers in terms of tourist type. The linguistic analysis has also highlighted the cultural differences which pattern native writer perception and interpretation of Puglia.

In order to analyze the concept of “hospitality”, a study was conducted on a corpus of brochures published by the Friuli Venezia Giulia region as part of its tourismpromotion campaign. The project starts with an analysis of the brand elements and linguistic collocations so as to highlight the concept of “uniqueness” in addition to that of “hospitality”.

This article outlines the main features of interaction in business settings based on the experience of the author, who dealt with this kind of work first as a free lance interpreter and then as a juniormanager for a decade, and was thus able to see the dynamics of this type of social interaction at play first as an external consultant and then as an employee. Understanding the virtual rules on which a specific type of interaction is based enables to know what to expect and this is precisely what junior interpreters need to know, in that: Knowledge of the negotiating styles adopted by different cultural groups is of paramount importance for successful interpreting. The interpreter must be familiar with these styles, which largely emerge through a combination of behaviors and only some of which are linguistic.(Gentile 1996: 119-120)

The study deals with the “Guests of Special People” brand used by the Friuli Venezia Giulia region as part of its tourism promotion campaign and focuses on the analysis of a number of press releases published from 2004 to 2009. By analyzing the examples provided in the press releases, the function of the brand was classified in a wide range of contexts. Great attention was paid to the linguistic collocation of the claimitself

Localization can be considered a production process and as such is subject to the laws of the market, its quality standards and philosophy (Total Quality Management). The same standards can be applied to the processes involved in a localization project, such as the translation phase which is commonly outsourced to language service providers or localization companies. The translation phase can be further broken down into a process component and a product component, each with its own quality standards. However, quality in translation is amuch debated subject and does not lend itself to a straightforward application tomarket scenarios, let alone localization. This is why criteria to evaluate translation within the scope of a localization project need to be clearly established. Once the appropriate criteria and error categories are selected, a linguistic inspection should provide an objective and quantifiable evaluation of the quality level of a translation. A means to measure translation quality is the Translation Quality Index used at Lionbridge Technologies Inc., a localization company which will be the main source of examples for this article.

Institutional tourist communication is primarily characterized by promotional messages richly endowed with persuasive-seductive suggestions subsequently to convince readers to enact actual travel experiences;more powerfully than in other tourist editorial products they are conveyed through a discourse intertwining iconic and verbal strategies aimed at highlighting themost enticing features of the territory promoted, in the present case the Friuli Venezia Giulia Region, Italy. The author, by means of examples drawn from a corpus of institutional brochures, in particular underscores the organizational format of thismulti-faceted discourse. A study of the linguistic and visual resources most intensively resorted to is undertaken to determine whether and to what extent the texts succeed in conveying conceptual frames aimed at orienting and cajoling the would-be visitor thanks to recurrent leading narrativemoves.

This paper deals with a pedagogical experience carried out during the 2008-2009 academic year with the students of the 2nd level course in “Technical and Scientific Translation from Italian into Spanish” of theMA degree in Translation (Advanced School of Modern Languages for Translators and Interpreters, Trieste). Its objectives included not only verifying new forms of didactic organization but also examining the challenges which tourism texts pose for the quality of a translation. The results of this experience have been extremely positive, having provided the students with the opportunity to acquire an intense awareness about their skills and capabilities before entering the work environment.

This paper deals with tourismcommunication and Institutional Tourism Web Translation through the observation of discourses for tourist use on the Italian town of Trieste. First of all, it focuses on French guides and Italian institutional Web sites to indicate how a French tourist-traveller can build his images of Trieste before his departure. The second part aims at analysing Italian Institutional Web Translation into French. Particular attention is paid to translation strategies mainly involving three terms: translation, adaptation and localisation.

This article presents a commentary on some aspects dealing with specialized translation of the languages of philosophy and sociology of racism. After being published in journals of philosophy and collective works, the articles analyzed here appeared in Gooding-Williams’s 2006 volume Look, a Negro!: Philosophical Essays on Race, Culture and Politics. Devoted to some of the themes at hand in the debate about anti-black racismin contemporary America, these essays show the author’s commitment to his subject, reporting his colleagues’ ideas and presenting his own. They are written in a warm, engaging style, which aims at persuading the reader to take side in the debate about anti-black racismand – possibly – to agree with their author.

There is still little agreement on how to test the essential prerequisites of candidates applying for admission to translator training institutions; indeed, there is a substantial lack of scientific discussion on the quality assessment of admission translation exams. The following case study starts fromthe obvious premise that the appraisal of “potential” translation skills cannot rest on the same criteria used to judge the performance of students but should rather focus on requirements such as logical thinking and a basic ability tomanipulate linguistic structures. The first part of the study provides a description of the English into Italian translation test used in the 2009 admission examof the SSLMIT of Trieste. It is prospective in nature:major translation problems are outlined and virtual errors analyzed and evaluated according to quantitative criteria. The second part is devoted to the discussion of the most frequent types of actual errors and to a consistent quality assessment of the candidates' performance in order to establish whether the specific kind of translation test adequately serves the purpose of selection.