Rivista internazionale di tecnica della traduzione n.05 - 2000

Since the birth of the European Community in 1957, the hectic political activity of the European institutions has given rise to an ever-increasing terminological body, to the extent that an overwhelming number of glossaries and handbooks have been published over the years in order to familiarize citizens with the too often obscure concepts and expressions employed by the so-called Eurocrats. In this article we will look at the underlying reasons for the presumed obscurity of the European institutions' language. In the first part we will analyze some of the ways in which the creation of the Community lexicon takes place (above all, the shift of meaning from already existing words to new words with a Community-related significance, but also metaphors, derivatives and abbreviations). The second part will be focused on a more translation-related aspect, that is to say the ways (mostly loan translations) in which newly-coined words are adapted into the 11 official languages of the Union, in order to create a consistent legal terminology valid in all 15 Member States. However, as one can imagine, the adaptation of a lexical unit into the languages and the legal procedures of 15 Member States is a far from perfect process, and can easily lead to misunderstandings, sometimes with serious legal consequences or simply to a lack of transparency for the public. Lastly, some cases in point are examined, with particular reference to the Italian language.

The focus of this article is on the translation of comics. In the first part the author provides a review of the existing research in the translation of this particular textual genre andfinds that for a long time comics have been ignored by Translation Studies as an object of investigation in their own right. Sometimes used as mere examples to illustrate the technique of "compensation" or a "reader-centred" translation approach, comics have been recently included in a new type of translation called "constrained translation", where the illustration is seen as a constraint for the translator. In contrast to such an approach, the second part of the article proposes a translation approach to comics where the linguistic and the semiological aspects have a parallel status. Translators need therefore to develop their semiotic competence in order to be able to consider the illustration as a fundamental semantic feature of the linguistic message in the creation of the story.

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 purpose of this paper is to present the difficulties involved in a comparison of ltalian and German terms of narratology. The terminological records which have been compiled for the comparison are going to become part of the terminological database stored by the SSLMIT of the University of Trieste. Firstly the article outlines the difficulties provided by the fact that narratology, a term that was coined in the 1960s to refer to the study of narrative and its structure, in fact embraces a wide range of approaches, which inevitably leads to problems of synonymy and polysemy in its terminology. Secondly the article highlights the vagueness of the concepts underlying numerous narratological terms, which makes it very difficult to define clearly even the most basic terms used in the analysis of literary texts, such as "narration", "perspective" and "focalisation". A final difficulty is provided by the problem of semantic equivalence that a terminological comparison between two different languages inevitably provides.

Traditionally, terminological products such as glossaries have been used to find suitable equivalents in the coding stage of translation, i.e. in the reformulation of the message in the target language. Developments in terminology have led to the creation of glossaries and terminological data banks which now often include background information on terms. On these grounds, an experiment has been conducted with fourth-year students of the translation course at the Scuola Superiore di Lingue Moderne per Interpreti e Traduttori of the University of Trieste to ascertain whether terminological products can also be of service in the preliminary stage of translation, i.e. in message decoding through text analysis. A model of terminological text analysis for the purposes of specialised translation was devised and a group of students was asked to adopt it for the experiment, while a control group of students was given a list of translation equivalents and was allowed to use other reference material. Although further tests are needed to confirm the authors' hypotheses, the results of the experiment suggest that terminological products including background information on terms may partially make up for lack of subject-specific knowledge when conducting text analysis in the preliminary stage of translation of highly specialised texts.

This article investigates the use of parallel corpora as part of un integrated approach to translator training and considers its effectiveness in helping to develop a learning environment where static word-for-word equivalence in meaning between target and source text is replaced by a dynamic notion of chunk-by-chunk equivalence in use. The author argues that, far from being a drawback, the different levels of adequacy represented by the target texts in the corpus can be used in the classroom to enhance translation criticism. Moreover, parallel corpora can be used to provide the students with useful insights into the practices of the translation industry, including the ability to revise the translation of a fellow translator. By way of exemplification, the different translations into Italian of the multi-functional item -ing form are investigated.