Rivista internazionale di tecnica della traduzione n.18 - 2016

Multilingualism is a founding principle of the European Union enshrined in the Treaties. In order to ensure that this principle is adhered to in the European Parliament, the Directorate-General for Translation has, over the years, developed a resource-efficient approach that guarantees timely delivery of high-quality translations. Technology is one of the key elements in this development, which prompts us to consider different questions and challenges, such as: How do we control our complex environment? What is the profile of a modern translator? How can we continue to deliver high quality on time?

Despite the lack of an element comparable to the “definite article” found in major western languages, which is alien to its structure, Turkish is often able to indicate whether a noun phrase is definite or indefinite through morphological, syntactic and suprasegmental resources. This paper examines in detail how an agglutinative synthetic language like Turkish uses these various strategies.

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 Don Quijote into Italian. The original text by Cervantes is here compared with Franciosini’s translation, published in 1622, to evaluate a range of translational choices and their rationale. Broadly speaking, Franciosini’s translation can be considered reliable, although mistakes emerge deriving from inaccuracies and miscomprehensions. This study only focuses on the second chapter of part one, pending further investigation on the remaining text.

Translating in a national institutional setting such as the Italian Ministry of the Interior poses unique challenges to in-house professional translators as they endeavour to convey the “voice” of the public administration to a large and diverse international audience of practitioners and private citizens who interact with the Ministry for various reasons on a daily basis. Starting from an overview of foreign language services provided by the Ministry’s staff linguists, this paper focuses on translation services and explores in detail text types, clients and readership and the special challenges represented by L2 translation along with the strategies and practices adopted by staff translators to cater for the specific translation needs of both central and peripheral offices of the Interior Ministry. To illustrate all this, the two authors have drawn extensively on their own daily experience as staff linguists within two different structures of the Ministry, namely the Criminal Police Directorate in Rome and the Police Headquarters of Gorizia, offering a number of practical examples of translation of Italian texts into English, their L2 and the preferred choice for almost the totality of the Ministry’s communication needs.

The Catcher in the Rye is a cult book of the 20th Century. Although he introduced no novelty in terms of narrative technique, Salinger achieved a realistic reproduction of teenage informal speech that was instrumental to the book’s artistic and poetic success. Similarly, Adriana Motti’s 1961 Italian translation of the novel was hailed as a literary turning point because of its linguistic innovations. This paper examines the main differences between Motti’s translation and Matteo Colombo’s 2014 version, which was produced with the explicit aim of “rejuvenating” its language. The study uses a quali-quantitative approach focussing on both lexicometric measurements and lexical aspects that can shed light on the purportedly updated imitation of teenage colloquial Italian. Our findings show that Colombo succeeded in decreasing the lexical richness and fragmenting syntactic structures in order to reflect Holden Caulfield’s highly repetitive idiolect. In addition, Colombo’s lexical selection discards many of Motti’s stylized and imaginative peculiarities and is more realistic and loyal to low-register Italian.

The article investigates two issues. First, whether the argument that teaching staff should only teach translation into their native language is valid and supported by factual evidence. Previous research on this issue is reviewed: based on the transcriptions of video recordings of the lessons conducted by 6 translation teachers (2 bilingual, 2 native, 2 non-native speakers of the TL), it is argued that each of these three groups can contribute to the teaching process in L2 translation classes. The second aim of the article is to investigate whether there is any correlation between student performances when they translate into L1 and when they translate into L2 and L3. The grades of 580 final exams consisting of translation into languages L1, L2 and L3 at an MA programme in translation were surveyed. It has been established that on average students tend to perform slightly better when translating into L1 than when translating into L2 or L3. However, there is a strong correlation between the grades an individual student receives for translation into L2 and those for translation into L1. It is therefore tentatively concluded that directionality is not the defining factor influencing graduates’ performance and the acceptability of their output.

How translation does justice to the style of a literary text is a question which occupied translators and translation scholars long before the emergence of the discipline of Translation Studies and which is also of primary importance in the didactics of literary translation. This paper aims to illustrate a method of comparative stylistic analysis that seeks to combine a target-oriented, non-normative approach to the study of translated literature, as envisaged by Descriptive Translation Studies, with a more traditional, strictly linguistic source-oriented approach. It also draws on one of the basic principles of cognitive stylistics, i.e. the notion that the style of a literary text affects the reader’s perception of the fictional world constructed by the author. Three Italian translations of the opening passage of Edgar Allan Poe’s The Fall of the House of Usher will be compared with the purpose of highlighting their main stylistic differences and their potential effects on the reader. Each translation will then be contrasted with the source text in order to pin down translation strategies, assess their degree of accuracy and finally show how the individual style of the translators becomes visible in the target texts.

The main objective of this study is to analyze the linguistic phenomenon of false friends from a cognitive perspective in order to better define the concept. To do so, we have analyzed to what extent the thought processes and the cultural context of two Romance languages (Italian and Spanish) have influenced the way some specific false friends have evolved. Major contrast s have emerged due to the pragmatic use of lexical items in different contexts. Following the application of the concept of “dimension ” on various examples, we will be able to compare the characteristic of each lexical item.

Text comprehension is often ignored as a specific source of difficulty in translation. Yet it is an essential step of the translation process and for some texts it requires reading skills that only native speakers of the source language are likely to possess. This article proposes a brief overview of the variables affecting reading comprehension and then discusses source text difficulty as a possible cause of mistranslations.

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 will discuss why active foreign language competence is an essential skill that universities must teach translation students to ensure that they can meet the market needs of today and tomorrow. Commencing with a discussion of the native speaker principle and the traditional arguments against translating into the non-native language, this paper will critically examine the native speaker principle, its assumptions and consequences before going on to explain why the academic ideal, propagated particularly at Anglophone universities, of the target language native-speaking translator often does not, for many reasons, fit with what clients really want and need. The paper will conclude by illustrating additional benefits of excellent foreign language competence, aside from the question of translating into the non-native language, to ensure that graduates are equipped to master the many additional skills they must acquire in order to be competitive in the market and to maximise their flexibility and adaptability in an ever-changing industry.

This paper gives a concise summary of the motivation, design and findings of the International Association of Professional Translators and Interpreters’ (IAPTI) survey on translation into a non-native language.