Search

This chapter explores the challenges encountered by the translator of Evelyn Conlon’s fiction. As will be argued, the writer’s gendered perspective, unobtrusive, and yet powerfully pervasive, cannot be ignored by the translator. In this respect, Conlon’s female characters fictionally embody what Donna Haraway (1988) has called “situated practices.” Drawing on all this, the chapter will focus on a discussion of the Italian translations (by the author of the chapter herself) of “Dear You,” first published in English and Italian in the literary journal Tratti (2013) and of “Two Gallants,” published in Dubliners 100 (2014).

The entry - completely rewritten and expanded for the 3rd edition of the Encyclopedia - offers a thorough overview of studies in the translation of advertising material. Particular attention has been devoted to multimodal and intersemiotic approaches, interculturality, and non-Western authors, especially those whose market-driven views that - together with the critical and feminist perspectives adopted by other scholars - appear promising new areas of research on the translation of advertising.

In this paper, I aim to explore the survival, recirculation and revitalization of James Joyce’s Ulysses in today’s global popular culture and Italian literary polysystem, through two apparently very different case studies – references to Joyce and Bloomsday in the animated series, The Simpsons, and in the Italian novel Un’Odissea minuta (Di Schüler 2016), respectively. My scope is not to compare the texts themselves with the original Ulysses. Rather, I will try to point out the relevance of such revitalizations in terms of intersemiotic translation, within the conceptual framework of polysystem theory. This perspective might be useful to point out the survival and recirculation of another very Ulyssean (and modernist at large) trait, the cross-fertilization of popular culture and ‘high’ culture in a potentially infinite loop of reciprocal reference.

The elastic scattering of the radioactive nucleus Be7 from a Si28 target was studied at four near-barrier energies: 13.2, 17.2, 19.8, and 22.0 MeV (E/VC=1.14, 1.48, 1.71, and 1.90). Angular distribution measurements were performed at each energy with the multidetector array EXPADES in conjunction with two Parallel-Plate Avalanche Counters (PPAC) to enable beam ray reconstruction of the events. The data are analyzed in a double-folding framework and the energy evolution of the optical potential as well as the total reaction cross sections are deduced and discussed. © 2017 American Physical Society.

The production of α and He3 particles, the cluster constituents of Be7, in the Be7+Si28 reaction was studied at three near-barrier energies, namely 13, 20, and 22 MeV. Angular distribution measurements were performed at each energy, and the data were analyzed in both statistical model and Distorted-Wave Born Approximation (DWBA) frameworks in order to disentangle the degree of competition between direct and compound channels. The energy evolution of the ratio of direct to total reaction cross section was mapped in comparison with similar data for Li6 and Li7 projectiles on a Si28 target. The results indicate larger transfer contributions for collisions involving the mirror nuclei Be7 and Li7 than in the Li6 case. Fusion cross sections were deduced, taking into account the α-particle cross sections due to compound-nucleus formation and particle multiplicities deduced from our statistical model framework. It was found that fusion is compatible with systematics and single-barrier penetration cross sections to within an uncertainty band of 10% to 20%. Indications of fusion hindrance for Li7 and Be7 compared to Li6, starting from the barrier and below it, are given. This hindrance is attributed to the existence of large transfer channels. Furthermore, the experimental results, analyzed in the DWBA framework, suggest He3 and He4 transfer as the dominant direct reaction mechanism. © 2016 American Physical Society.

Elastic scattering of Be-7+Si-28 was studied at several near barrier energies for probing the energy dependence of the optical potential. Our analysis at 17.2 MeV will be presented in this article and discussed, in terms of Continuum Coupled Channel Calculations (CDCC). This research is part of a long term plan concerning the energy dependence of the optical potential for weakly bound projectiles, at near barrier energies and for probing the potential threshold anomaly. The experiment took place at the EXOTIC facility - Laboratori Nationali di Legnaro (LNL), and refers to an angular distribution measurement, using the detector array EXPADES (Exotic Particle Detection System). Results at 9 MeV (Rutherford region) were also analyzed and were used for estimating the solid angle. Our analysis for other energies is under process.

Si tratta della cura di un dossier monografico sul film "The Village" che racchiude i contributi di una giornata di studio a cui hanno partecipato anche studiosi internazionali di diverse discipline (T. Moylan, Irlanda; E. Whitaker, USA; Miguel Angel Ramiro Aviles, Spagna).

In presenting the volume, this paper argues that Joyce stands at the crossroads of different languages and cultures, which is to say, a point of both encounters and departures. As an icon of twentieth-century modernism, Joyce extends a welcoming hand to multilingualism, cross-cultural meetings, babelic intersections, and diverse approaches from different disciplines. The collection is situated at the crossroads between Joyce studies, translation studies and cultural studies. The authors argue that the contributions from scholars who represent such different cultures as the European and the North American melting pot are particularly apt for drawing the image of a Joyce at the crossroads, like a monument to be admired and written upon, but also an icon at the centre of a rotary intersection, towering over and above the travellers who go around it on their different ways in order to reach their different goals. Joyce, in fact, not only as a writer but also as a human being, placed himself at the crossroads of different languages and cultures, sometimes bridging, sometimes highlighting the gaps between them.

On 22 February 2006, a group of researchers from the Department of Interdisciplinary Studies on Translation, Languages and Culture of the University of Bologna, along with researchers from the University of Limerick and the California Polytechnic State University, met in Forlì to discuss M. Night Shyamalan’s film, The Village (2004). The meeting, part of a series of workshops entitled “Places Within Places,” involved the screening of the film followed by a discussion in which all participants responded from their own disciplinary standpoints: anthropology, cultural studies, gender studies, history, linguistics, literature, translation studies, and utopian studies. The film is about a withdrawn and self-sustaining intentional community living in the middle of the woods in what seems to be the year 1897. The community has struck a deal with fierce creatures that live in the forest: each will not trespass the other’s boundary in exchange for peace. The group is guided by the Elders: among them Edward Walker stands out as the community’s leader and teacher. Among the younger generation, three characters stand out: Lucius, who is curious about the outside world (the towns); Noah, the village fool who functions as the outsider and scapegoat; and Ivy, Walker’s blind daughter who will be made part of the community’s secrets. Shyamalan’s film has met with various criticisms. However, this “Forlì community” thinks that both in spite of those criticisms as well as because of them, the film provides a rich and interesting “text” to work with. We are also aware that we are reading this text through the lens of our own disciplines, which do not include film studies as such. Nevertheless, we find the film interesting to work with because it deals with many themes, ideas, and concerns of our times: fear, its manipulation, and the question of safety; paranoia, violence, and modes of repression; the problems around the need to enforce and maintain rigid oppositions and boundaries; the relation with the Other; and last, but not least, the possibility of Utopia in our anti-utopian times. This dossier stems from spontaneous, unmediated group discussion of the film and the ideas and concerns it called forth. Thus, it has been difficult to group papers together in uniform categories. The best we can do is to pick out a few strands from that tangle of common topics and concepts that run across more than one contribution. Thus, the theme of the utopian or dystopian nature of The Village community is discussed by Moylan, Ramiro Avilés, and Baccolini, who, together with Leech, also analyze the politics which hold that community together. Such politics, as Leech, Varney, and Whitsitt point out, are mainly based on fear, but also on boundaries and containment, a theme that recurs in Varney, Whitaker, and Torresi. The relation between the political and the economic, on the question of money and the distribution of labour (or absence thereof), is discussed by Whitaker, Sangiorgi, and Baccolini; Moylan discusses the politics of the control over memory, Whitaker the politics of the perception of the Other, Baccolini the question of individual choice, Torresi the problem of the control over information, and Sangiorgi the subtle tactics of linguistic control. And as Varney and Whitsitt point out, the only way to escape such strict control is madness or irrationality, which, however, becomes a threat for the whole community.

The authors discuss the “disruptive potential” of Ulysses to the literary polysystem in terms of its generative and re-generative influence on cultural environment of the target language. Translation contributes to linguistic innovation through new writings that include retranslations. Bollettieri Bosinelli and Torresi’s discussion of the Italian translations of Ulysses traces the differences between the seminal 1960 translation by De Angelis and the recent retranslations by Celati and Terrinoni. What sounded colloquial enough in De Angelis’s foreignized translation needs to be “reforeignized” for 21st century Italian readers. While some instances of retranslation attempt to domesticate the original, micro-domestication on the idiomatic level might be actually essential for the macro-foreignization processes to become visible.

This first chapter of the volume frames non professional translation and interpreting (NPIT) in their current contexts, both as practices and as objects of academic research. It defines the field, sheds light on the many names of NPIT, reviews the literature produced so far on the subject, and offers a point for investigating NPIT with scientific rigour despite professionals' righteous resistance against non-professional practices.

This chapter explores the way in which mechanically or digitally acquired images (photographs and video recordings) are used in the legal, administrative and journalistic practices in the UK, USA, New Zealand, Australia, Canada, Malta and Italy. In the criminal procedure systems analysed here, mechanically or digitally acquired images tend to be accepted as evidence more uncritically than verbal ­testimony – as something that is harder to manipulate than words and is less prone to bias or distortion since, according to a commonly held misperception, it is generated by a machine rather than a human being. Following the same principle, in the norms and practices involved in issuing personal documents, such images tend to be uncritically taken for granted as proof of identity. A similar presupposition of truth implicitly establishes an identity relation between news reports and the accompanying images, which are shown to present verbal descriptions as incontrovertibly true and accurate. The value of absolute truth implicitly attached to photographic or filmic images, however, contrasts with both semiotic theory and practical considerations. Possible origins and traces left by the stereotype of photographic truth in semiotic theory are discussed, and an argument is made to start considering mechanically or digitally acquired images as signs rather than mere analogue representations of reality.

Come ogni genere promozionale, la promozione turistica ha uno scopo persuasivo che generalmente richiede una traduzione di tipo funzionale, orientata a riprodurre l’effetto che il testo vuole ottenere sul destinatario, ossia lo Skopos del testo (Reiss e Vermeer 1984/1991; Nord 1997; Schäffner 1998, 2009). Per tale motivo, la traduzione della promozione turistica può essere ascritta alle categorie della consumer-oriented translation (cf. p.es. Hervey e Higgins 2002 [1992]: 196-204; Hervey, Higgins e Loughridge 2006 [1995]: 145-154) e della covert translation (House 1981 [1977]: 189). Ciò implica un approccio caratterizzato da una forte preferenza per l’addomesticamento del testo alla lingua e cultura di arrivo (Venuti 1995, 1998). Uno degli strumenti a disposizione del/la traduttore/trice per incrementare la leggibilità e “naturalezza” del testo d’arrivo è l’introduzione di sintagmi idiomatici e collocazioni fisse o frequenti che ricorrano nel discorso della promozione turistica prodotto in lingua d’arrivo, che quindi suonino familiari al lettore-tipo. Verranno presentati e discussi a questo proposito vari esempi tratti da una guida turistica dell’Azienda di promozione turistica (ATP) dell’Emilia-Romagna, in originale e in traduzione inglese. Si sottolineerà l’importanza del contesto di lavoro nelle scelte traduttive, e verranno fornite riflessioni sull’idiomatizzazione dei testi tradotti in inglese per un pubblico principalmente non madrelingua, che potenzialmente usa l’inglese come lingua franca.

Promotional and advertising texts come in different forms and account for a considerable share of the translation market. Advertisements, company brochures, websites, tourist guides, institutional information campaigns, and even personal CVs all share a common primary purpose: that of persuading the reader to buy something, be it a product or a lifestyle, or to act in a particular way, from taking preventive measures against health risks to employing one candidate in preference to another. Consequently, their translation requires the application of techniques which, although they vary depending on the specific text type, are all aimed at preserving that persuasive purpose. This often requires in-depth cultural adaptation and, on occasion, thorough rewriting. Translating Promotional and Advertising Texts covers different areas of personal promotion, business to business promotion, institutional and business to consumer promotion, including advertising. Numerous examples from a wide variety of languages and media, taken from the author's own professional experience and from real-life observation, are provided throughout.

Child Language Brokering (CLB) is a widespread although relatively unexplored practice. Most studies conducted so far are based on children's (and their families') reported experiences of CLB and do not take into account the third party involved in child-mediated communication, namely institutions. The present paper illustrates the preliminary findings of a research project called “In MedIO PUER(I)”, which looks at CLB as a non-professional form of community interpreting. Semi-structured interviews were conducted with managers and operators of local authorities and service providers located in the Forlì-Cesena area in North-East Italy. The aim of the interviews was to highlight institutional perceptions of language brokering in general (be it professional or ad-hoc), and of CLB in particular. Overall, respondents, while expressing their concerns for CLB-related ethical issues, “defended” it as a valuable resource to interface with adult migrants, and provided some interesting insights into its positive and negative impact on children and their families, as well as on its social and cultural implications.

Acknowledging the role of factors that can be labelled as subjective and contextual in the production of original or interpreted oral text, several interpreting studies researchers have opted for an integration of different techniques and methodologies of data collection and analysis that can be loosely termed as sociolinguistic. Such authors have thus in fact reached a level of interdisciplinarity, whether openly acknowledged or not, which can now serve as a platform for holistic attempts at describing a linguistic, semiotic and social phenomenon as complex and multifaceted as mediated interaction. To name but a few, Cecilia Wadensjö (e.g. 2001) integrates conversation and discourse analysis in her study of dialogue interpreting in institutional contexts. Claudia Angelelli (2003 and 2004) uses questionnaires – a sociolinguistic and ethnolinguistic technique – in her survey of community and conference interpreters. Ebru Diriker (2004) exposes the delusory nature of objectivity claims in conference interpreting studies and adopts the openly political perspective of critical discourse analysis, incorporating concepts from cultural and gender studies as well as ethnolinguistic and sociolinguistic techniques such as interviews and field observation. Such famous examples show how productive and fruitful interdisciplinary approaches to IS can be. In the first section of this paper a tentative definition of sociolinguistics as used in interpreting studies will be provided, and the applications of sociolinguistics to interpreting research will be compared with discourse analysis and approaches exclusively focusing on conversation analysis. The second section, structured as a literature review, contains a literature review of sociolinguistic approaches applied to the analysis of recorded data in the neutrality/non-neutrality discourse.

In this paper I will focus essentially on the process, rather than the results, of the development of an Italian-American identity. Like all "hyphenated" identities, Italian-Americanness challenges us with several open questions about its very nature. In particular, is becoming an Italian-American a process of adding something American to an Italian identity, losing parts of this supposedly original identity without becoming fully American? Or is it a growing process, a process of becoming something completely different from the Italian identity without just taking on an American identity through Americanization? The construction of national and/or ethnic identities is an extremely complex process, and its results are often ambiguous and heterogeneous. Not unlike other ethnic identities that have emerged in the U.S., the formation of an Italian-American identity was (and still is) complicated by a number of factors connected to Italian history and culture, the history of Italian immigration to the U.S., and relations with mainstream American society and other ethnic groups.

Advertising texts have been widely studied from the linguistic and sociological points of view, and have also been one of the favoured objects of semiotic analysis (from Barthes and Eco to the recent developments of visual and social semiotics). They have not, however, received the same treatment by translation studies. Especially before the year 2000, promotional materials (including sub-genres such as advertising, publicity, and tourist brochures) were mainly used in general translation handbooks or textbooks as examples, or ‘special cases’ of translation. Although several specialized articles had already been published, systematic research into advertising translation per se started only very recently, with monographs (Guidère 2000a, Bueno García 2000) and edited volumes (Adab and Valdés 2004). Recent research also marked a shift away from purely linguistic or verbal-only approaches, opening up new insights into the intersemiotic and multimodal nature of advertising texts, while also highlighting the need to take the cultural dimension of advertising translation into account. The entry, after investigating the reasons why advertising has been long neglected by translation studies (it is a largely non-verbal genre), critically analyzes verbal-only, intersemiotic and cultural approaches to advertising translation, linking them to their respective theoretical backgrounds.

The paper investigates the shift from the verbal to the visual, and from informative to evocative messages, in the history of advertising. When did cross-reference to cultural values, topoi, norms and beliefs become an essential tool of advertising (Van Zoonen 1994; Livolsi 1987)? In other words, what persuaded advertisers and their clients to stop informing prospective customers about products and start selling them lifestyles and dreams, both conscious and subconscious? A possible answer to these questions is suggested, and implications more directly related to the translation of advertising texts are also addressed.

According to Lawrence Venuti (1995, 1998a, 1998b), practical approaches to literary translation can be subsumed under the mutually exclusive strategies of domestication (making the text familiar for the target reader) and foreignization (making, or leaving, the text unfamiliar for the target reader). The translator chooses between such strategies both at the pre-translation stage, when s/he chooses the text to submit to the publisher, and at the interlinguistic translation stage proper. Taking into consideration the second stage only, this paper aims at showing that, whereas it may be easy to assign most translations of mainstream literary genres to one of those two strategies, in the case of Ulysses this becomes much harder, because of the inherently foreignizing nature of the source text. As will be shown through practical examples from the Italian translation by Giulio de Angelis, in Ulysses translation macro-foreignization (i.e., retaining the sense of ‘foreignness’ inherent in the original) can at times only be achieved through micro-domestication (i.e., reconstructing language effects and external references in such a way that can they can be functionally retrieved by the target reader). Another partially domesticating option that may preserve the overall foreignizing function of the text, and will also be discussed here, is that of complementing the text with an explanatory paratext.

The aim of this chapter is to explore two separate but closely related stereotypes that are often associated with Italian-Americanness in the American cinema of the 1990s – namely, the abuse of foul language, and aggressiveness in hostile conversation. The analysis will be based on a corpus of five American productions released between 1990 and 1999, subjected to qualitative analysis : Big Night, Jungle Fever, The Godfather – Part III, Analyze This and My Cousin Vinny. The selection of movies from different filmic genres is intentional, as it is my intention here to go beyond fixed clichés such as the mafioso, restaurateur or macho Latin lover, which are likely to be predominant in a one-genre corpus. Rather, I will focus on two of the stereotypes that define Italian Americanness as an abstract quality or ethnic identity, regardless of its individual embodiments (however archetypical they may be).

Under the traditional approach to translation, pictures and graphic layout are considered to be external to the translator’s realm. This paper suggests the possibility of an alternative approach to the translation of (print) advertisements, under which the verbal and the visual appear intrinsically linked: the text appears as a semiotic whole, where every sign is there for the translator to use. Three examples confirm this interpretation, displaying the semiotic complexity of apparently referential pictures and showing how graphic layouts and pictures may be adapted across cultures. They also help disprove several stereotypes about the nature of the visual code as opposed to verbal language, such as the priority of the verbal over the visual, the immediacy of visual signs and the truthfulness of pictures, thus providing grounds for a more comprehensive view of the text and a more active use of visual elements by translators.

In M. Night Shyamalan’s The Village, the definition of spaces and territories through borders and boundariescan be seen as a vast complex of symbols or allegories which reinforce notions that are recurrent throughout the film, such as the conservation of utopia (see Baccolini in this dossier) and the need to alienate strong passions from the utopian community (see Whitsitt in this dossier). When projected against the background of Patriot Act America and the media revival of the Clash of Civilizations, it also inevitably becomes a metaphor of how Otherness and potential threats can be dealt with through the creation of psychological and mythical divides (fears) between “us” and “the others.”

Unlike more advanced countries, Italy does not have a national register for interpreters and/or translators. This leaves a gap which is partly filled by national professional associations, such as AITI, ANITI, Assotraduttori and Assointerpreti, which both guarantee for and monitor their members’ professionalism at the national level. On 27 March 2004, a group of interpreters and translators mainly based in Forlì and graduated from the local Advanced School of Modern Languages for Interpreters and Translators (SSLiMIT) of the University of Bologna, founded a non-profit association called TradInFo. The purposes of the association are mainly to network local professionals and offer them permanent training and more visibility, at the local level, than they would have individually. It is governed by a Statute and a Code of Ethics; new memberships are approved by the Board of Councillors if the candidate can prove significant professional experience as interpreter/translator, or automatically if the candidate graduated from the SSLiMITs of the Universities of Bologna or Trieste, thus making TradInFo more inclusive than other national associations, to become a member of which candidates must have worked for a certain period of time at fixed rates and take an examination or, as in the case of Assointerpreti, serve an apprenticeship. As of the end of October 2004, TradInFo has approximately 35 members. Although this figure is rising constantly, it is clear that this association will never reach the numbers of other, more renowned national associations. This is due to the founders’ intention of keeping the association local, mainly in order to facilitate direct contact between the members and their active participation in courses, bi-yearly general assemblies and monthly informal meetings. Small numbers are also key to participation: the volume of mail circulated on the TradInFo mailing list never exceeded 250 messages monthly, ensuring that all members of TradInFo are in a position of reading all messages posted on the list, which is used for administrative purposes as well as professional queries. Courses and meetings are organized whenever a sufficient number of members propose them and agree to participate, and virtually all members contribute their ideas and devote a portion of their time to the association’s activities and projects. Information of all kinds, glossaries, useful links, dictionaries and other resources are shared among the members, thus creating an environment of participative democracy, a real, rather than virtual, “community” of interpreters and translators. Thus, a small association like TradInFo can be considered a necessary integration to larger, more powerful but perhaps also less cohesive associations.

Food and foodways are one of the main means of ethnic self-identification in the USA, to the point that it overshadows other ethnic signifiers such as religion and sense of community in younger Italian Americans, thus enforcing the stereotypes about Italian-American identity. The word ‘macaroni’ was used to label Italian-American immigrants, reducing them to pasta-eating figurines, setting them further apart from other ethnic groups and erasing more complex aspects of their own identity. The denigration of Italian foodways was one of the first forms of xenophobia experienced by the Italian-American community, and it was one of the factors contributing to the strengthening of the ties inside the community itself. After a brief overview on the eating habits of Italian immigrants during the 20th Century, the essay provides an account of the role of food in the representation of Italian-Americans in the American cinema of the 1990s with a keener interest in the movies "Big Night", "The Godfather Part III", "Analyze This" and "Jungle Fever".