Incapsulazione nominale e referenza estesa nella lingua della sociologia

Abstract

This study analyses two cohesive devices, i.e. labelling and extended reference, in a corpus of German and Italian articles of sociology. The corpus contained original articles in both languages, as well as their translations. A comparison of the original articles revealed a quantitative difference between the two languages, with Italian showing a stronger preference for labelling compared to German. An analysis of the translations then showed that they are rather strongly influenced by the distribution patterns of the source language. However, a certain amount of adaptation was found in the translations from German into Italian, where in some cases an extended reference was replaced with a labelling device. This kind of substitution seems to fit in with a general tendency of translators to introduce a greater degree of explicitness in the target text. The last section of the article describes translation problems caused by both labelling and extended reference and stresses the importance of dealing with these cohesive devices in translation teaching.