Rivista internazionale di tecnica della traduzione n.08 - 2004

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 paper describes the International Classification of Functioning (ICF), published in 2001 by the World Health Organisation. Based on a thorough revision of a former classification (the International Classification of Impairments, Disabilities and Handicaps of 1980), the ICF is used mainly in the field of health and disability. The revision process that took place between the two classifications led to profound changes and is here characterised as an evolution as far as both content and terminological aspects are concerned. In particular, the terminological innovations the ICF presents regard not only the terms themselves but also the terminological principles underlying the classification. The paper also looks at the ICF as an example of terminological standardisation, discussing problems that are generally linked to standardisation in fields other than manufacturing and the hard sciences. Finally, a few hints are made to the process whereby the ICF was translated into other languages and some translated terms are discussed with particular reference to German and Italian.

This study takes into consideration some essential features of Dutch medical language, contrasting them with features of Italian medical language and comparing these data with observations made on other Germanic and Romance languages. The purpose is to give an outline of the typological position of Dutch and Italian with respect to their language families. First, Dutch nominal compounds are analysed, focusing on a phenomenon typical of Germanic languages: a double vocabulary, consisting of a native and a non-native, neoclassical layer. Attention is then shifted to the morphosyntactic level, highlighting the specific behaviour of adjectives in Italian and other Romance languages, in particular their syntactic functionality and right-branching structure, which favours clausal expansion. As a consequence of stronger nominalization patterns in Italian with respect to Dutch, complex prepositions are briefly analysed; followed by a discussion of the verbal system, which emphasizes the use of concrete forms and complex verbs in Dutch. Both exhibit a typical Germanic style, which is in strong contrast with the more abstract, grammatical hardware-like verbs of Italian and other Romance languages.

In LSP translating the production of naturally-sounding, idiomatic target texts is often taken to mean special attention in the use of terminology. However, research in the distribution of the elements of the message in different languages shows that the representation of the information structure is language-specific and that there are language-specific focus-attributing positions within the syntactic structure of sentences. In this paper, features of information structure and focus-attributing positions will be studied in a corpus of English-Italian translations of popular physics articles and compared with a corpus of original Italian articles on the same topic to see if the Italian information structure is used in translation or whether target texts reproduce the original English information structure. Results will show that translations use – at least to a certain extent – the original English information structure, therefore making target texts sound partly unnatural. A number of revision strategies will be proposed to reinstate a more typical Italian information structure in order to ensure that the informational value of sentence elements is preserved and higher-quality LSP translations are produced.