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.

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?

How translation does justice to the style of a literary text is a question which occupied translators and translation scholars long before the emergence of the discipline of Translation Studies and which is also of primary importance in the didactics of literary translation. This paper aims to illustrate a method of comparative stylistic analysis that seeks to combine a target-oriented, non-normative approach to the study of translated literature, as envisaged by Descriptive Translation Studies, with a more traditional, strictly linguistic source-oriented approach. It also draws on one of the basic principles of cognitive stylistics, i.e. the notion that the style of a literary text affects the reader’s perception of the fictional world constructed by the author. Three Italian translations of the opening passage of Edgar Allan Poe’s The Fall of the House of Usher will be compared with the purpose of highlighting their main stylistic differences and their potential effects on the reader. Each translation will then be contrasted with the source text in order to pin down translation strategies, assess their degree of accuracy and finally show how the individual style of the translators becomes visible in the target texts.

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.

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.