Rivista internazionale di tecnica della traduzione n.18 - 2016

Despite the lack of an element comparable to the “definite article” found in major western languages, which is alien to its structure, Turkish is often able to indicate whether a noun phrase is definite or indefinite through morphological, syntactic and suprasegmental resources. This paper examines in detail how an agglutinative synthetic language like Turkish uses these various strategies.

The main objective of this study is to analyze the linguistic phenomenon of false friends from a cognitive perspective in order to better define the concept. To do so, we have analyzed to what extent the thought processes and the cultural context of two Romance languages (Italian and Spanish) have influenced the way some specific false friends have evolved. Major contrast s have emerged due to the pragmatic use of lexical items in different contexts. Following the application of the concept of “dimension ” on various examples, we will be able to compare the characteristic of each lexical item.

The Catcher in the Rye is a cult book of the 20th Century. Although he introduced no novelty in terms of narrative technique, Salinger achieved a realistic reproduction of teenage informal speech that was instrumental to the book’s artistic and poetic success. Similarly, Adriana Motti’s 1961 Italian translation of the novel was hailed as a literary turning point because of its linguistic innovations. This paper examines the main differences between Motti’s translation and Matteo Colombo’s 2014 version, which was produced with the explicit aim of “rejuvenating” its language. The study uses a quali-quantitative approach focussing on both lexicometric measurements and lexical aspects that can shed light on the purportedly updated imitation of teenage colloquial Italian. Our findings show that Colombo succeeded in decreasing the lexical richness and fragmenting syntactic structures in order to reflect Holden Caulfield’s highly repetitive idiolect. In addition, Colombo’s lexical selection discards many of Motti’s stylized and imaginative peculiarities and is more realistic and loyal to low-register Italian.

Multilingualism is a founding principle of the European Union enshrined in the Treaties. In order to ensure that this principle is adhered to in the European Parliament, the Directorate-General for Translation has, over the years, developed a resource-efficient approach that guarantees timely delivery of high-quality translations. Technology is one of the key elements in this development, which prompts us to consider different questions and challenges, such as: How do we control our complex environment? What is the profile of a modern translator? How can we continue to deliver high quality on time?

Text comprehension is often ignored as a specific source of difficulty in translation. Yet it is an essential step of the translation process and for some texts it requires reading skills that only native speakers of the source language are likely to possess. This article proposes a brief overview of the variables affecting reading comprehension and then discusses source text difficulty as a possible cause of mistranslations.