Analisi di un corpus parallelo inglese-italiano di pubbblicazioni dell'OMS: sintassi, lessico e resa della modalità

Abstract

This paper deals with a computer-assisted study of a corpus of WHO publications in English and their translations in Italian, and describes a method of using a parallel corpus to investigate both linguistic and translation phenomena, with particular reference to modal auxiliaries. The analysis focuses on the WordList function of the WordSmith Tools suite to create alphabetical and frequency-ordered lists of the words found in the corpus, and statistical information. First, the general features of the source and target texts are investigated, such as sentence number, mean sentence length, lexical variety and density, and the incidence of nouns and verbs. Inferences are then made about the systemic differences between English and Italian as well as the “universals” of translation. Secondly, the study concentrates on modality, and wordlists are again used to analyse the presence of modal expressions in the corpus, and in particular to compare the incidence of English modals in the source texts and their most “direct” translations in the target texts. Given the imbalances found, each modal auxiliary is also analysed through semi-automatic alignment to identify the main translation strategies used.