Rivista internazionale di tecnica della traduzione n.03 - 1998

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 article highlights fundamental events in the life of Marguerite Duras better to appreciate their profound influence on the literary, cultural and intellectual development of the writer. Subsequently, an analysisi is carried out of specific linguistic and stylistic aspects of Duras' last two works and of the strategies implemented for their translation into Italian. Structural analogies and dissimilarities of the language pair French-Italian are considered with a view to a critical assessment of the product of the translation process.

This review focuses on the translation of a selection of poetry written by Federico García Lorca entitled “Alle cinque della sera. Lamento per Ignacio e altre poesie”. The translations themselves provide excellent examples of bad translations. Though translating is never an easy task, it is even more taxing when the text is poetry. In this particular example, the source and the target languages come from the sarne family. The distortions apparent here, both formal and semantic, demonstrate how superficially certain translators have judged their understanding of the language they were translating from. Moreover, they appear to have been unaware that it is, in fact, the affinity between the two languages which lulled them into a false sense of security. The paper highlights a number of these infelicities, inappropriacies and complete errors which have been brought about by an excess of imagination, carelessness or plain ignorance. It also highlights some of the more surprising and unfounded comments and cultural information offered to the target text reader.