Rivista internazionale di tecnica della traduzione n.10 - 2008

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 article is a first-hand presentation of the history, the activities and the current developments of the Steunpunt Literair Vertalen (Literary Translation Support Office), which operates a coordinated training programme aimed at improving the linguistic skills of would-be as well as experienced translators. The Support Office is a co-operative venture involving the University of Utrecht and the Lessius Hogeschool in Antwerp and sponsored by the Nederlandse Taalunie (Dutch Language Union). Among other activities, the Steunpunt organized a successful summer course on literary translation held at the Lessius Hogeschool in Antwerp aimed at improving the skills of young literary translators from Dutch into Italian. The first two authors of this contribution,in fact, were selected as young translators for the training and the seminars held during that course, while Paris was involved as an experienced teacher and translator in the development of the linguistic skills of the participants. In giving their presentation, the authors focus in particular on their experience during the 2006 summer course.

The present article dwells upon several linguistic considerations, which arose during the translation of the novel Balerina, balerina: kratki roman written by Marko Sosic, one of the greatest representatives of the Slovene cultural panorama in Italy. The interest towards the novel was nourished by his particular style, and most of all by the different linguistic varieties used by the author, which accurately reproduce the multilingual situation characterizing the Slovene community in Italy. All of these factors required a very complex approach to translation. The paper focuses on the translation process, sociolinguistics, and, in particular, questions regarding the Italian language varieties to be used to reproduce the routine communication code of those who belong to the Slovene community. The problems of adopting a single translation method aimed at mirroring the complexity of those linguistic varieties is discussed, a long discussion of the inevitable loss in the passage from one language to the other. The paper concludes questioning the utility of the theoretical concept of equivalence in translation.

The unfortunate expression “comics” for a medium that is never just funny or amusing in itself, has contributed considerably to the ambiguity of its definition and the perception of the sequential art (Eisner 1985: 5) in general. Distinguishing between the full range of possibilities comics offer in connection with form and content, artistic value and readership could be a first step for a deeper understanding of this medium. Indeed, this has been the objective behind the translation of Joe Sacco’s “Safe Area Gorazde. The War in Eastern Bosnia 1992-95”, in which the author combines the techniques of eye witness reportage with the medium of comic-book story telling, giving a “colourful” account in black and white of life during the Balkan conflict. Besides the need for an effective management of the restraints posed by the coexistence of words and images in the source text, the translator’s challenge has been to render the synergetic impact of the informative and expressive function of the original text in the target text, by switching between a semantic and a communicative approach to translation. The semantic allows the individual and creative traits of the author’s work to be duly preserved, while the communicative accounts for the systematic handling of the lexicon, syntax, style and structure in response to the writer’s communicative intent. The particular “hybrid nature” of Joe Sacco’s story has called for aesthetically calibrated choices between internal and external text factors throughout the entire translation process, the final result of which shows how Christiane Nord’s text analysis and translation theory can be of great assistance to the translator.