Rivista internazionale di tecnica della traduzione n.13 - 2011

Error analysis and product assessment are increasingly viewed as reductive procedures in translation pedagogy. In the current paper, a case is made for ‘rehabilitating’ error analysis, especially in advanced L2 translation teaching. Attention is drawn to its usefulness in creating a group profile for L2 translation trainees, particularly as regards the scope it offers for showing how aspects of linguistic transfer frequently considered marginal, when taken individually, are, on the contrary, significant if viewed cumulatively. In the course of the article it is suggested that error analysis can be used dynamically to show that apparently sporadic and ‘low level’ aspects of transfer are among the most frequent problems, and that they consistently interlock with ‘higher-level’ textual and contextual (if not cultural) considerations. Far from encouraging a transmissionist stance on the part of the L1 teachers normally responsible for L2 translation courses, error analysis can be used to empower L2 students. One way in which this can be done is through a focus on technologies that address the issues emerging from the analysis. This should make students increasingly independent of the intuitive, internalized knowledge of their trainers, both in the short term and in the course of their professional careers.

Translating into Italian Sign Language (LIS) involves the transposition of a written text to sign language (SL) by means of recording the sign language. Sign language is a non-alphabetic language because it lacks a shared written form, although efforts in creating one are in progress. The recording enables us to control the production in SL, any errors can be detected, corrected and re-filmed. Some aspects of translation are discussed, such as planning and sign language production control. This paper is a study of the theoretical approach of translation applied to LIS. A tourist guide of Venice is translated from Italian to LIS, and this experience is a starting point to examine different problems: the transposition of the written text into a recorded video text from a technical point of view; the analysis of specific structures of written language that require translating into a language whose structures are closer to spoken language; the choice of the most appropriate lexical elements (e.g. choice of regional words for places, art terms). Section 4 examines the lexical level in greater detail and provides some specific examples of LIS. This study aims to open a new field of LIS research and to promote translation of informative and cultural material. Moreover, these considerations concerning mainly lexical elements could offer important insights for studies of the linguistics of LIS. This also could make possibile to create a literature in LIS, natural language of deaf people, thus enabling them to access it in a complete and autonomous mode.

The present article tries to demonstrate the interdependence between cultural facts and translation, referring more specifically to the translation between the Italian and the German language. The scientific interest was until now mainly focussed on general theories about the interdependence between culture and translation without giving concrete examples nor taking into account specific languages. Therefore it seemed useful to study the specific combination between German and Italian for translation. One of the main purposes of this article consists in giving a practical help to translation teachers and students in order to bridge the gap between translation theory and practical work. It tries to give a schematic description of some cultural facts and figures in Italy comparing them to cultural aspects in German speaking countries. All those factors are subsumed to cultural elements that could give a first clue for a cultural based translation between the two above mentioned languages.

The aim of this paper is to investigate how Italian and Spanish fansubbers cope with the translation of intertextuality in order to exploit others’ experience in translation teaching practice. Examples of solutions employed by amateur translators were provided from the serial 'Supernatural', where visual and verbal references to US culture are largely employed. Studying a small corpus of solutions, especially the wrong ones – i.e. those not conveying both reference and function of quotes – we understood that the inadequate level of encyclopaedic knowledge mastered by the young amateur translators may be the cause of erroneous translations. In fact, the procedures they employ to solve intertextual challenges show that most of the fansubbers are not able to recognise the reference behind the quotations, or if they do it, hardly can they recover the proper source or its codified translation into the target culture. As a result, sometimes textual coherence is affected, leading spectators to a general incomprehension of the use of intertextuality.

Translators need good reading skills, but first-year translation students often demonstrate only basic reading literacy which often results in inaccurate interpretation of the source text and a divergent message in the target text, often strongly influenced by the prevailing opinion in the target culture and/or by the translator’s personal opinion. We tested first-year and third-year students in their reading literacy in the source language (English), their ability to summarize what they read and to translate the text into the target language (Slovenian). The results show that the freshmen’s basic reading skills are satisfactory, but more advanced reading skills, such as interpretative and creative reading, present problems, which result in deficient summaries in the target language. In addition, the students’ creative reading is negatively affected by insufficient general knowledge and, surprisingly, their (or their culture’s) ideological point of view. The ability of the third-year students to understand and re-write a text in the target language was much improved, but the ideological influence was still there, especially in the parts of the text that were difficult, or close to the students’ personal experience.

The question why interdisciplinary research and approach in translation didactics has become essential and of interest to translation studies will be outlined prior to highlighting three to our thinking major disciplines of interest. Those are: 1. cognitive and affective sciences with a specific interest of evaluation methods and the implicit and explicit knowledge; 2. cognitive sciences and neurosciences leading to a more proficient structuring of a course; 3. research in competences, analyzing first and foremost the different competences, such as social competence, methodological competence, personal competence and acting competence. Linked to the research in competences is of course the pathway which trainers pave for their learners and which leads from novices to experts, taking into account the interface with the professional world. A practical example of a course, in which all these reflections are integrated and structured according to Bloom’s taxonomy, will mark the last part of this paper.

In the German medical language, but not so much in the Italian one, there are basically two different types of terms: neoclassical terms, compounds made up of Latin or Ancient Greek elements, also named internationalisms, and native terms, mainly morphological calques that preserve the structure of the neoclassical compound but use German elements and are therefore semantically transparent to the general public. This difference between the German and Italian medical language creates some difficulties to the translator, both from German to Italian and from Italian to German, primarily at the lower level of specialized discourse, i.e. in expert-lay communication. This paper will suggest some translation strategies and will illustrate the case of a text genre specific to medical language, the package leaflet.

The paper brings a brief presentation of key concepts of the Meaning-Text Theory and focuses on the practical value of its lexicographical tool for the description of syntagmatic meaning relations, i.e. the lexical functions (LFs). Although originally developed to facilitate the description of lexical relationships within the monolingual explanatory-combinatory dictionary, the system of lexical functions proves highly valuable in the bilingual setting as well, particularly in the L1-L2 translation, i.e. in encoding tasks. While translation into the translator’s mother tongue is commonly regarded as less likely to suffer from poor knowledge of collocations, it is the L1-L2 translation that is typically affected by the translators’ erring on the collocational side. On the basis of selected lexical items the paper will bring a brief comparison of lexicographical presentations used in encoding (Slovene-English dictionaries) with the results of the LF-based approach. Applied systematically and consistently within a given lexical field, the encoding-adapted system of LFs will help translation students get a better grasp of the elusive collocability of lexemes.

This paper focuses on various problems concerning the metalanguage of translation, such as polysemy, synonymy and terms borrowed from other disciplines. These aspects are a sign of research progress and dynamism and do not only occur in Translation Studies, but also in linguistics, with which Translation Studies have a common ground. It remains important however that Translation Studies elaborate and define thier own specific terminology. This article consists of two parts. The first one provides a brief description of the glossaries, dictionaries and encyclopedias published up to the present time, in order to show the editors’ purposes. The second part offers an analysis of some Italian terms in relation to the English-related concepts/terms, showing how difficult it is to translate the metalanguage of translation.

The concept of “meme” proposed by Chesterman (1997; 2000) describes the activity of translation as the spreading of ideas towards other cultures by means of the addition of new texts. The memetic metamorphosis is the reflection of a mental process in which the translator creates the interaction of the cognitive schemes of the target culture with those of the source culture. The overlapping of schemes is also ruled by the mental representation of a “cognitive scheme of cooperation between actors” (cf. Risku 1998: 52) established by the translator. This scheme of cooperation is based on certain norms of meaning negotiation and, therefore, conditions the translators mental representation of the “projected source text” (cf. Hönig 1997: 51). Negotiation of meaning in translation can exist – micro- and macro-strategically – at different textual levels, and this negotiation of meaning that exists in the cultural overlapping of cognitive schemes enables intercultural communication. The idea of “scheme” proposed in the present paper, in relation to “translational norms” (Toury 1995) and “memes” (Chesterman 1997), is partially based on Eco’s cognitive semantics (1999) and it serves as a useful theoretical construct for negotiating meaning in translation teaching. We will further describe how texts change when they are translated by means of an example to show the effectiveness of this theory.

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.

The current trend in advertising translation is not to apply theoretical translation models. Nowadays, the competence of professional translators is mainly based on experience and despite the efforts of empirical research, theory seems to be of little use to translators. The question is: can the theoretical support be useful to the advertising translator? Can the process in professional translation be explained in terms of norms when we talk about a peculiar discourse with a pragmatic meaning such as advertising? In order to determine if and how theory and norms can motivate and justify translation strategies, this paper explores reasons behind the main difficulty in translation process by revealing both the nature of persuasive discourse in advertisement and external factors such as Market and Advertising Regulation.

This paper attempts to relate translation studies and the theory of language acquisition, two research areas that have traditionally developed separately, by looking at recent findings on some grammatical properties of translated texts on the one hand, and the results of acquisitional studies dealing with those same properties on the other. In addition to reviewing research on the long known phenomenon of pronoun overuse, it focuses on a less explored problem, namely the overuse of possessive adjectives, reporting preliminary data from English to Serbian translations. Based on a comparison with the results obtained in acquisitional studies of possessives, it is argued that the different cases of patterning between translation and language acquisition, in particular second language acquisition and first language attrition, point to a similarity in the linguistic systems of translators and language acquirers, or attriters, and speak in favour of closer collaboration between the fields. In particular, we suggest that such collaboration could be of benefit to future translators, whom the knowledge of language acquisition theory could help become more aware of the domains of grammar that are particularly problematic.

This paper focuses on the centrality of meaning in the practice of translation. Since this major concern is also shared by Systemic Functional Linguistics (Halliday 1994; Halliday & Matthiessen 2004), which considers language a meaning making resource, it is argued that such an approach could serve as a helpful tool for translator education and training. After a theoretical first part, where the relevance of Systemic Functional Linguistics to the activity of translating is discussed and a cursory sketch of its key notions is outlined, the paper moves on to present illustrative segments from a small selection of English sample texts and of their translation into Italian. Dealing with different text types, and drawing on authentic teaching assignments, some lexicogrammatical features are analysed in order to identify the multidimensional meanings being realized. Special focus is on modality, ideational grammatical metaphor, thematic progression and also on appraisal systems, a model for evaluation recently developed within the framework of Hallidayan linguistics (Martin & White 2005). The empirical examples are offered to show that a based on this perspective might represent for the translator an ideal “set of resources for describing, interpreting and making meaning” (Butt et al. 2000: 3).

This paper argues that the text-type “patent” is eminently suitable for teaching specialized translation at MA level. Translating a patent is a challenge at two levels, given that its technical content is expressed by means of a textual and linguistic framework which in fact is of a legal nature. Consequently, the translation process confronts the translator with no easy task because it must necessarily involve a different approach at the theoretical and practical levels, accounting for the morphosyntactic, lexical and textual peculiarities of both the technical and legal components. Nevertheless a number of features – such as rigid layout rules, recurrent syntactic and lexical structures and a marked tendency towards redundancy and monosemy – counterbalance the aforesaid complexity. That of patents is therefore a somewhat unique text type, which is particularly suitable for specialized translation classes at MA level for at least two reasons. Firstly, students are forced to adopt different translation strategies to cope with the patent’s both technical and legal features. Secondly, translating a patent involves an extensive use of CAT tools. This makes such a text type particularly suitable for introducing students to professional translation, which is the ultimate goal of our teaching activity.

The paper proposes a translation model for contracts in which different stances, i.e. Snell Hornby’s integrated approach (1995), the functionalist views with the 'skopos' theory (Reiß & Vermeer 1984) and the concept of 'cultureme' (Oksaar 1988: 26-27; Vermeer 1983: 8; Nord 1997: 34), as well as Chesterman’s theory of 'memes' (1997) are upgraded with the findings of comparative law regarding differences between legal systems and their impacts on the corresponding legal languages. The model consists of ten phases, each addressing one of the specific linguistic and extra-linguistic aspects of the contract as a text type. When translating contracts, a very specific situation may arise with respect to the cultural embeddedness of the target text, since memes of different legal cultures may co-exist on its various levels in order to meet the 'skopos' of the translation. This is especially the case when the contracting parties decide to use a third language as a 'lingua franca', which may lack any direct correlation with the legal culture(s) underlying the contract.