Rivista internazionale di tecnica della traduzione n.23 - 2021

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 concerns an example of statistical analysis of a large diachronic corpus, including 100 works of Italian fiction, with the aim of recognizing prototypical trends in words frequencies and identifying clusters of words that share similar temporal patterns. Starting from the insights of literary scholars, this study tries to test the hypothesis (often brought forward in literary history) that the inner life of the authors and/or their characters gained more importance during the Nineteenth century and represents one of the cornerstones of modernism. Although this hypothesis cannot be rejected, the adopted statistical methods do not highlight clear-cut temporal patterns: some slight trends emerge but a large share of words individually show an undifferentiated behaviour over time. The idea of studying the occurrence in the texts of the inner expression of the writers from a diachronic perspective is certainly very ambitious. This first experiment shows some strengths of the statistical tools but also some limits of the criteria adopted for both the constitution of the corpus and the selection of linguistic features to be observed.

This paper illustrates methods, tools, and preliminary results of a study aimed to create a list of job titles and analyze them in a corpus of 100 Italian canonical and non-canonical fictional prose works published between 1825 and 1923. Job titles are interesting because they reflect socio-economic changes, as well as giving important information on how literary settings and genres changed. After a short introduction on job titles, we will discuss tools and methods used for the creation of a list of words, data extraction, and data representation, both from a linguistic and programming point of view. Some preliminary results will be shown and discussed with a statistical approach: data do not suggest significant patterns over time: whereas job titles appear more or less consistent from a chronological point of view. Finally, some advantages and limitations will be examined. The goal of this study is to develop a set of tools and methods that can be easily reproduced to build complex lexical lists, find their items, and represent data for corpora of any genre and size in a simple and effective way.