Rivista internazionale di tecnica della traduzione n.25 - 2023

Exploring language simplification and intralingual translation: insights, results and desiderata. Rivista Internazionale di Tecnica della Traduzione (RITT) The Rivista Internazionale di Tecnica della Traduzione – International Journal of Translation of the IUSLIT Department and Scuola Superiore di Lingue Moderne per Interpreti e Traduttori, University of Trieste aims at providing a forum of discussion for the multifaceted activity of translation and related issues.

This contribution unveils the outcomes of a research project undertaken in 2021 by the Dutch section of the University of Trieste, as a collaborative effort within the framework of the Dutch Literature in Translation international platform. The project's primary aim was the comprehensive analysis and comparative evaluation of the Italian, French, English, and German translations of Cees Nooteboom's novel Rituelen (1980). The focal point of this inquiry lies in the diverse translation strategies employed to convey culture-bound terms embedded in the source text. Moreover, the study involved a group of ten Italian students in Applied interlinguistic communication and Conference interpreting and solicited their insights regarding the translation choices concerning culture-bound terms in the Italian rendition. This article opens by focusing on literary translation as a form of cultural mediation and the translation of culture-bound terms and on Cees Nooteboom's work from a transnational point of view. Subsequently, the findings of our research project are exposed by focussing on the results related to two case studies: culture-bound terms that are linked to the history of the Netherlands and heterolingualism in the scrutinized novel. For each case study different translation techniques as well as students’ comments will be analysed in a transnational perspective.

Instrumentality, a topic often mentioned in one and the same breath as agents and patients in thematic analyses, is rarely considered a linguistic element in its own right. In the context of everyday language use, instrumentality is a very broad concept and is illustrated frequently, be it overt or not. The purpose of this paper is to analyse the different linguistic typologies and patterns that underlie the expression of different instrumental roles in Dutch and Italian and the function of gestures in instrumentality. Paradigms originating from cognitive and construction grammar are used to shed light on the processes that impact the expression and various typologies of instrumentality. This paper targets cut and break (C&B) verbs since they show particularly interesting characteristics. The analysis of a usage-based corpus, that consists of the free description of stimuli representing C&B events by native speakers, shows that instrumentality can assume almost all grammatical functions and is shown to be the result of joint meaning-construction between two participants in search of shared assumptions.

This paper aims at investigating Toury's law of interference, which posits that translations tend to under-represent target language features and to over-represent source language ones, by means of corpus-based empirical study. More specifically, it aims at testing the influence of French, the working language of the Court of Justice of the European Union (CJEU), on the Spanish and Italian versions of the CJEU judgments. The analysis, carried out by comparing parallel corpora of judgments delivered by the CJEU (CSCG) and comparable corpora of non-translated texts issued by national judges (COSPE), provides an example of positive and negative transfer, namely the explicitation of the subject and the different frequency of use of complex prepositions. The results seem to confirm both instances of interference. As far as the positive transfer is concerned, since French is a non-pro-dop language – unlike Spanish and Italian –, more explicit subjects are actually found in European judgments. The differences in the frequency of phraseological patterns are seen as negative transfer: court translators tend to use complex prepositions resembling French ones rather than those traditionally used in national judgments. This paper yields interesting results which confirm the law of interference and suggest further investigation on the overlapping of different translation universals detected in CJEU judgments.