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.

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.

Translating in a national institutional setting such as the Italian Ministry of the Interior poses unique challenges to in-house professional translators as they endeavour to convey the “voice” of the public administration to a large and diverse international audience of practitioners and private citizens who interact with the Ministry for various reasons on a daily basis. Starting from an overview of foreign language services provided by the Ministry’s staff linguists, this paper focuses on translation services and explores in detail text types, clients and readership and the special challenges represented by L2 translation along with the strategies and practices adopted by staff translators to cater for the specific translation needs of both central and peripheral offices of the Interior Ministry. To illustrate all this, the two authors have drawn extensively on their own daily experience as staff linguists within two different structures of the Ministry, namely the Criminal Police Directorate in Rome and the Police Headquarters of Gorizia, offering a number of practical examples of translation of Italian texts into English, their L2 and the preferred choice for almost the totality of the Ministry’s communication needs.

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.

Among the translators from Spanish active in the 17th century, a leading role was played by Lorenzo Franciosini, the grammarian, lexicographer and author of the first translation of Don Quijote into Italian. The original text by Cervantes is here compared with Franciosini’s translation, published in 1622, to evaluate a range of translational choices and their rationale. Broadly speaking, Franciosini’s translation can be considered reliable, although mistakes emerge deriving from inaccuracies and miscomprehensions. This study only focuses on the second chapter of part one, pending further investigation on the remaining text.