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In the mid 1920s, Virginia Woolf was engaged in a dispute with the American critic Logan Pearsall Smith on “the ethics of writing articles at high rates for fashion papers”. Harper’s Bazaar, a commercial magazine to which Woolf contributed four short stories between 1930 and 1939, was a feminine periodical that exploited modernism’s distinction and high cultural capital to captivate a sophisticated, but essentially middle-class, readership by selling the illusion of upward cultural mobility. Although Woolf referred to her high-quality contributions to Harper’s Bazaar as “pot boiling stories for America” written “to make money”, it seems clear that her own engagement with a middlebrow publishing venue did not in the least affect her reputation as a highbrow intellectual and was indeed typical of the multifaceted, reciprocal relationship between the magazine and high modernism in a context in which mobility also meant redrawing the boundaries between intellectual and popular culture. The publication of modernist content within the glossy pages of Harper’s Bazaar was advantageous to both modernists seeking to maintain their celebrity status and the periodical itself, which attempted to cultivate and sustain a refined audience. Much in line with her work of the 1930s, Woolf’s short stories engaged with social and ethical issues such as the righteousness of penetrating other people’s lives and innermost truths (“In the Looking Glass”), violence and decay (“The Shooting Party”), capitalism and antisemitism (“The Duchess and the Jeweler”), human and non-human worlds (“Lappin and Lapinova”). Though often considered as non-canonical in terms of both their rather prosaic plot as well as characterisation, and the commercial venue in which they appeared, the stories Woolf wrote for Harper’s Bazaar reflect the preoccupations of the last decade of her career and are indicative of the tensions between high and low in modernist culture.

Well-being in academia is obviously tied to levels of burnout experienced by academics. Why are these levels increasing and how is their increase related to the marketization and neoliberalisation of universities? What should we, as academics, do in order to counter this trend and improve both our well-being and that of our students as well as society? These questions are addressed through experimental writing, employing techniques that are unusual for linguistics, namely autoethnography, in order to reflect on academic careers and the problems of mental health and harassment experienced by PhD students. Drawing inspiration from “transformative praxis”, this paper describes the approach of social justice teaching and conscientization. Focusing in particular on the theme of environmental education, the paper reflects on how introducing social justice teaching in academic courses is likely to prove helpful to prevent burnout and dissatisfaction. The second part of the paper describes the author’s experience with university courses about ecolinguistics and the feedback received from students, including a selection of their comments.

The present paper functions as an introduction to this special issue of mediAzioni, which brings together selected papers presented at the Translating Europe Workshop entitled "L'intelligenza artificiale per la traduzione verso una nuova progettazione didattica?" (3 December 2021), focusing on the pedagogical implications of Artificial Intelligence (AI), with a particular emphasis on Neural Machine Translation (NMT). The article revolves around three main themes. First, it considers the impact of emerging neural technologies on language services, redefining the traditional role of the translator and creating new responsibilities and tasks. Despite the considerable progress that NMT has made compared to previous models, it still has shortcomings that are almost "invisible" because they often lack clear grammatical or morphosyntactic marking. Such errors require a certain cognitive effort to identify, since they involve problems that are less obvious to the untrained eye, such as textuality or inadequacies at the level of discourse. Secondly, the article looks more closely at professional practices, especially those related to pre-editing, post-editing and proofreading. Particular emphasis is placed on the indispensable role of the human in translation workflows that integrate NMT not only at the level of post-editing and text revision, but also at the level of translation project management. Finally, the paper moves on to the implications of NMT for the training of translators and beyond, discussing key insights from the workshop participants regarding future teaching practices at university level. The article concludes by outlining the structure of this special issue and providing a brief synopsis of the collected papers.

Ad hoc corpora are considered effective to deliver native-like technical (and legal) translation. This paper explores how the translation of a system-specific document such as an Italian procura alle liti (power of attorney to appear in court) can be addressed. Translating this legal document may be problematic due to the fact that it is not recurrent in the common law system, which contemplates other types of special powers of attorney (PoAs). This paper explores whether and to what extent a corpus-based translation is possible when L2 parallel texts are difficult to find in native contexts. To this aim, a translation project with technical translators and lawyers is carried out. The participants compose an ad hoc corpus which they consult as a language reference tool. The paper findings report that the translators' corpus-based translation is mostly a word-by-word rendering of the source text, which may sound unnatural to an expert of the field. The lawyers' translation partly deviates from source words, but addresses the communicative function of the source text. The paper highlights the need for a balance between the two strategies, for example by focusing on textual functionality and/or paraphrasing, although at the cost of a reduced formulaicity.

Forensic Linguistics as a discipline has gone through more than 30 years of development in China, which can be divided into the brewing period, the establishment and development period, and the comprehensive improvement period. Scholars have presented the origin and development of forensic linguistics in the form of papers, monographs, translations, textbooks, seminars, conferences and other forms, which promotes the future development of forensic linguistics. In the past decade, the study of forensic linguistics has mainly focused on the theoretical research of forensic linguistics, the application of legislative and judicial language, the translation and teaching of legal language. This paper will adopt the method of literature research to summarize the origin and development of Chinese forensic linguistics in the past 30 years, and to anticipate the future development direction of forensic linguistics in the light of the current research characteristics and the hotspot of the times, so as to provide references for the theoretical development and application practice of current forensic linguistics, and to better guide future discipline development in China.

The ‘migration’ of concepts from one language to another, which takes place in cultural exchange, frequently gives rise to changes in the target language, primarily involving the lexical field. The reception of the Romanist legal tradition in China has led to the formation of a specialized lexicon which, along with the translation and production of Roman law-related works, has been subject to constant growth. This kind of terminological transposition has often resulted in the emergence in Chinese of more than one translatant for the same Latin word. As a concrete example of this phenomenon, this paper aims at providing a synoptical overview of the rendering in Chinese of the concepts of dolus and culpa, two legal institutions also largely connected to the field of commercial law. The sources analyzed from a diachronic and contrastive perspective range from the earliest manuals of Roman law published in China at the beginning of the twentieth century to recent documents, translated or directly composed in Chinese. More specifically, this paper will try to answer the following questions: what is the historical evolution of the main terms used in Chinese to express the concepts of dolus and culpa? What are the criteria adopted by Chinese translators/authors in choosing these terms? What are the main features and issues related to the linguistic rendering of the two legal institutions? As for the results of this study, attention will be paid to one of the peculiarities of the linguistic rendering of the concept of culpa, that is the use of two different translatants: guoshi 过失 and guocuo 过错. At the same time, another aspect on which this paper will shed light is the existence of a plethora of translatants related to the concept of dolus (qizha 欺诈, guyi 故意, zhaqi 诈欺, etc.). In this sense, on the one hand, it will be shown how the presence of multiple translatants is acceptable and useful when they are used to express the different shades of meaning conveyed by dolus and culpa that cannot be rendered by means of one single translatant for each of these two notions; on the other hand, this paper will highlight the necessity of a higher homogeneity and standardization of the Chinese Romanist lexicon.

Several organisations have recently started to pay more attention to their employees’ happiness since they have realized the tight relationship between employees’ well-being and productivity. In fact, research studies (Adams 2019; Kossek et al. 2014) have demonstrated how staff job satisfaction can be influenced by work-life balance and consequently help increase the profits of organisations. Since the growth of job stress among academics has been endangering their well-being (Bhatia and Mohsin 2020), a few scholars (Bailey and Phillips 2016; Bell et al. 2012; Heiden et al. 2021) have analysed the link between job pressure stress and health and the negative implications for both the performances of academics and the outcomes of students. In order to fight against the feeling of living in a threatening work context, some universities have begun to promote some initiatives and stress management practices to help their members to cope with increased symptoms of ill-being and psychological distress. As it is becoming increasingly usual that non-academic organisations include in their organigrams a new professional profile, the Chief Happiness Officer (CHO), in order to monitor their employees’ well-being, the present paper is intended to be the starting point of a debate on the potential role of the CHO in academia to promote a new academic culture based on happiness, satisfaction and sustainable positivity. In particular, the interest in this new profession raises the question of whether a CHO can actually contribute to improving well-being in academia or whether it can be more beneficial to focus on a “chief happiness officer mentality”, rather than a chief happiness officer person.

Medicine is undoubtedly one of the most important domains of specialised translation; its terminology is therefore paramount for translators. A significant niche consists in the language of clinical studies. However, to date there are no extensive terminological resources for translators in this field. The purpose of the present paper is to try and fill this gap by conducting a contrastive terminological analysis in German, English and Italian.

This paper presents the findings of a comparative discourse analysis of the linguistic representation of the phenomenon of ‘gentrification’ in three cities: London, São Paulo and Moscow. Gentrification is generally understood (see Chris Hamnett, 2003) as the social and spatial transition to a post-industrial economy, usually associated with displacement of lower income groups from the gentrified area. The study observes how discussions of the topic are linguistically shaped in different languages over the same period (pre-Covid, 2015-2018). The material was selected from open sources, following hashtags and keywords in three languages, limiting the material to the genre of public conversation transmitted by the media about the phenomenon under study. The study compares the circulation of the term ‘gentrification’ in selected discourses and shows a conceptual discrepancy between them. This is exemplified through the use of synonyms, substitution for the term, description and interpretation of the notion. This analysis covers the representation of the concepts of ‘community’, ‘collectiveness’ and, in contrast, ‘ghettoization’ for London, São Paulo and Moscow. The different ‘winners’ and ‘victims’ of gentrification for the three cities studied are revealed. The results show that gentrification is openly discussed in London, where changes are considered positive, whereas the Russian discourse on gentrification questions the validity of the term and the process itself in Russian cities. Brazilian urbanists agree that similar processes to gentrification are taking place in São Paulo, emphasizing the role of the Brazilian state and the so-called hidden unofficial powers within informal territories.

From a semantic perspective the relation of concession can be defined as a specific type of contrast between two states of affairs, i.e. counterexpectative contrast, in which the conflict originates by the denial of an assumption, generated by the first state of affair or by the context. The semantic domain of concessivity has been investigated by a fair amount of studies that have explored the variety of connectives used to express concession in an Italian-Russian contrastive perspective (Biagini/Latos 2010; Biagini 2016; Biagini/Mazzoleni 2017; 2018). In this paper we focus on the Italian adverbial connective tuttavia and its Russian most frequent counterparts, i.e. odnako, tem ne menee and vsë že. The data are taken from the Italian-Russian and Russian-Italian parallel sub-sections of the Russian National Corpus. For our research we considered contemporary original texts (from 1945 until today) and we analyzed a total of 377 examples with their translations: 87 for tuttavia, 195 for odnako, 16 for tem ne menee and 79 for vsë že. The aim of this paper is to shed light on language-specific tendencies in relation to the semantic and textual expression of concession. The present Italian-Russian contrastive analysis, that exploits both qualitative and quantitative methods, investigates three different aspects: (a) the type of coding of the relation (full coding, undercoding or inferential bridging, in terms of Prandi 2004; 2006), (b) the syntactic distribution of connectives, and (c) the combination of connectives and punctuation (cf. Ferrari/Pecorari 2018; Pecorari 2019). Although interference can play a role in translation, we observed interesting differences in the data of the two languages. The results of the multi-perspective analysis show that Russian seems to assign a major semantic and textual relevance to the concessive relation than Italian, by using a richer semantic coding and by giving it a key role in the textual architecture.

The paper reviews Bulgarian conjunction bez da and Italian conjunction senza (che), introducing the subordinate clause with the relating to an unaccomplished action. The paper explores grammatical, syntactic, and semantic properties of these constructions in both languages. The similarity of semantic and functional potential of Bulgarian and Italian constructions as well as their intralingual specificity are shown.

Fixed lexical or syntactical expressions and formulae hallmark legal language. They serve both linguistic and legal purposes, and should be rendered accordingly in a target language and legal system. Most of the times, however, formulaic expressions are translated by resorting to calques, false cognates, or phrases that are uncommon in the target legal language (and legal system). This paper is aimed at exploring how and if corpus analysis can dispel doubts and help find acceptable translation candidates. As there are currently no publicly available legal corpora addressing corporate documents such as contracts and agreements, this paper wishes to bridge this gap by building and relying on an ad hoc corpus of authentic agreements written in English as a first language according to the laws of England and Wales. In this way, corpus evidence can help find equivalents and, possibly, address recurrent mistranslations from Italian into English. During the corpus analysis process, the paper shows and discusses search queries and how equivalents can be obtained. At the same time, it questions dictionary entries. The paper findings highlight that the consultation of the ad hoc corpus allows to find acceptable translations of Italian legal formulae and address recurrent mistranslations. English formulaic expressions, in fact, can be rendered satisfactorily thanks to the possibility of noticing word usages in context, keywords in contexts and collocations. Further research can encompass a wider variety of formulae and/or legal documents so that scholars and translators can be equipped with useful reference tools.

The aim of this paper is reporting an experience of theatrical translation that lies halfway between translation theory and practice. The project «Tradurre per la scena» is the result of a partnership between three institutions in the city of Bari – the Alliance française, the Kismet OperA theatre and the former Dipartimento di Lingue e Letterature Romanze e Mediterranee of the University. In 2008, a theatre translation team was formed at the University department to work on an Italian version of Olivier Cadiot’s Fairy Queen (P.O.L., 2002). The team thus confronted on the many problems posed in the play translation due to the author’s unbridled writing: diverse issues concerning rhythm, speed, voice, tone, wordplay, etc. Beyond the actual translation experience, the team participants had the opportunity to meet the directors and actors responsible for performing Cadiot’s text, but also to attend rehearsals and to make corrections to the translation prepared during the group translation sessions. The play, in fact, was not only represented on stage. The Italian text was published in a bilingual edition in a collection specifically created by the University department. The author of this paper believes that an illustration of this experience could be of interest to specialists in theatrical translation for several reasons: a) because it brings into play a wide range of cultural skills (linguistic, stylistic, dramaturgical, semiotic, pedagogical, etc.); b) because it constitutes one of the rare examples of collective translation, and moreover in a field that has been rather neglected by theoretical reflection; c) because it offers the rare opportunity to follow the ideally complete path of a foreign play from the stage to the publisher; d) because it closely examines the complexity of the relationship between the translator and the playwright, the actor, and even the author.

In this paper, we explore the practical and theoretical status of revision in the context of a Masters-level website translation project integrating machine translation (MT) for teaching purposes. We use textometric analysis to explore the nature of modifications made at each of the different stages of revision during the lifetime of one particular project. Computation of characteristic elements and Correspondence Analysis (CA) reveal regular patterns of linguistic intervention, with significant differences observed between the initial stages of the project (MT-EN0 generated by SYSTRAN Pure Neural Machine Translation and post-edited MT-EN1) and subsequent revision cycles. We combine quantitative and qualitative research methods to study characteristic revision patterns in different project cycles (chronological textual series). While some of these patterns represent unpredictable “punctual” edits, the majority are “progressive”, involving modifications that are predictable or gradually built up throughout the project. More generally, it appears that different types of revision closely mirror the guidelines that are presented to students during the teaching workflow. This observation leads us to posit an “evolutive” view of the translation project: just as each webpage in the project has to undergo several cycles of revision, so each stage of revision needs to be carefully primed during the preparation of the project with the clients as well as the students.

Neural machine translation (NMT) systems have made tangible progress in recent years, making them usable for an increasing number of domains and language pairs. The development of neural systems is based on machine learning algorithms and requires large electronic corpora of parallel texts, aligned at the sentence level. Such resources however only exist for a small number of language pairs and domains. To overcome this problem, a recent proposal is to develop so-called “multilingual” translation systems. These developments have been driven in particular by major Internet players, who need to develop automatic language processing tools for as many languages as possible. The main characteristic of these systems is to process multiple languages, both on the source and target sides, with a single translation engine. In this paper, we present the general principles underlying these systems and the innovations that have made them possible, before discussing their main strengths and weaknesses.

Translation technologies are widely used in the translation process and the market is witnessing a radical change in translation practices, with a significant impact on the translation professions. It is important that translation programmes adopted by universities consider the rapid advances in language and translation technologies and devote specific theoretical and practical courses to this topic. Students need to develop specific competences and skills and acquire an advanced mastery of the technologies. In particular, given the current dominant paradigm in machine translation, namely Neural Machine Translation, they need to be aware of the benefits but also the challenges it poses to translators. This paper discusses the concept of “human parity”, which has been proposed in the field as the main goal of current machine translation systems, and presents the teaching and learning of translation technology, with a particular focus on what has been developed at the University of Naples L'Orientale.

Since the first studies observing pedagogical activities related to quality in translator training, many evolutions have taken place, in training programmes as well as in the professional world. Revision has gained a more streamline position in translation processes, and post-editing more and more visible, aided by the improvement of Neural Machine Translation (NMT) quality. These two activities, which aim at upgrading human translations, for revision, and machine translations, for post-editing, still respond to different expectations, practices and document types. However, the role of the skilled expert is acknowledged in normative texts about both activities, and the sealed barriers that existed before between human translation, assisted translation and machine translation, are increasingly blurred. In this paper, we will endeavour to set an integrated and balanced positioning of post-editing in translation training, leveraging the strengths and weaknesses of human translation as much as machine translation, in order to contribute to the long-lasting value of the professional translation specialist.

A human right to the environment is increasingly recognised in both domestic and international law. Also in Polish legal scholarship, there is a discussion over the possibility of deriving a right to the environment from the Constitution or ordinary statutes, including Article 4(1) of the Environmental Protection Law Act. The existing English translations of its opening words, and specifically the term powszechne korzystanie ze środowiska, appear to mirror the legal controversy. Compared to Poland, the major common law jurisdictions, i.e. England and the USA, show multiple differences in respect of the public’s enjoyment of the environment. In addition to a distinct legal mentalité, grounded on a case-by-case approach, negative freedoms and remedies thinking, both jurisdictions are characterised by considerable private ownership of natural resources like rivers and forests. In view of this legal and translation problem, the present paper seeks to employ comparative law methodology to establish an acceptable English translation equivalent of the term powszechne korzystanie ze środowiska. The analysis is also an attempt to go beyond the ways in which the use of comparative law in legal translation is typically perceived, i.e., beyond functionalism, beyond micorcomparison and beyond conceptual analysis.

This paper aims to investigate how empathy and assertiveness are expressed linguistically in two corpora (MUJERES y HOMBRES) of fifteen TED talks each, with a view to identifying whether the women in the sample adopt a more empathetic communicative style than men. The frequency and use of deictics, and a number of intensifiers and hedges will be analyzed starting from the comparison of key POS lists in the two corpora. The results of the study suggest a marked preference of the women in the sample for the use of affiliative, empathetic mechanisms, since they employ first person narratives associated with affective vocabulary, inclusive nosotros, question tags and verbs in the second person plural more often (although for the same purposes) than men.

The fields of Italian finance and economics are particularly rich in the use of English loanwords, as both non-adapted and adapted Anglicisms can be retrieved in general Italian monolingual dictionaries. If we consider the specific case of audiovisual translation, it is possible to observe an increasing use of Anglicisms in the Italian dubbed versions of audiovisual products set in the world of finance. Firstly, this paper will analyze the case of the first season of Devils (2020), a financial thriller drama television series. The analysis will investigate the translation strategies used to transpose the specialized financial terminology used in the dialogues, focusing in particular on the significant presence of new Anglicisms in the target text. Secondly, the presence of these Anglicisms in the Italian dubbed version of the film The Big Short (2015) will be analyzed, in order to compare their use in both productions. Finally, the paper ends with a practice-based interlingual study involving a number of Italian undergraduate students in Economics, aiming at establishing whether they use the new Anglicisms identified in the Italian dubbed version of Devils.

The paper focuses on time marks that may be detected in common law agreements and the translation issues they imply. In the first section, the author discusses the relation between time and law. The legal time governs the social time, as it ensures order and security. If memory is the manifestation of the legal past, the promise is the expression of the legal future. Depending on the legal culture taken into account, the legislator’s time may be more or less important than the time of the judge. The second section of the paper deals with time avatars that may be identified at the macrotextual level. The contract is understood as a promise that becomes obligation. The legal time is also expressed in contracts by the predictive capability of the parties, its acceleration and backwardness, its finiteness. The last section is an analysis of the translation of terms, collocations and metaphors expressing time in common law contracts.

Several are the European Directives dedicated to e-commerce, focussing on consumer rights, the distance marketing of consumer financial services and the protection of consumers indistance contracts.In contract law, the terms “termination”, “withdrawal”and “cancellation”have peculiar and distinct meaning. Nonetheless, they tend to be misused and applied interchangeably. This article will shed light on these relevant terms in thelight of EU Directives on the protection of consumer rights in off-premises and distance contracts.To do so, it will first present instances in which the meaningand use of these terms is either clear-cut or somehow blurred. By analysing word usage and meaning in context, it will explore how EU Directives, and EU drafters in general, made(un)ambiguous distinctions. Then, it will investigate whether English-speaking drafters (such as those of the pre-Brexit UK, Ireland and Malta) made a consistent use ofsuch terms. Finally, this paper will explore whether online conditions of sale writtenin English by non-English speaking sellers or traders (such as Italian and Polish) also make a consistent use of the terms.The paper findings highlight that the use andlegal purpose of these terms in European Directives have not been particularly consistent over the years. Furthermore, Member States’system-specificity has weighed on the meaning, application and scope of the terms. On the other hand, at EU level the absence of a unique legal system of reference and the challenges of harmonization may have created false equivalences.

This paper mainly discusses the distribution and rhetorical functions of personal pronouns in English and Chinese legal news reports which is divided into two narrative types, the objective and the semi-dialogic. Through the comparative analysis of some English and Chinese legal news texts in the two types, it finds that the differences in narrative type directly affect the distribution of personal pronouns. In objective narrative, the use of third person pronouns accounts for an absolute proportion, and the frequency of using first person and second person pronouns is close to zero. In semi-dialogic narrative, the use of third person pronouns is still the highest, but only slightly higher than the use of first person and second person pronouns, accounting for only a small number. After analysis, this paper holds that there are three reasons for the uneven distribution: first, the differences between the dialogic style and the narrative style; second, the legal narrative being a story narrative; third, the specific restrictions on the use of legal rhetoric.

It is generally assumed that a good knowledge of the legal field is a prerequisite to deliver legal translations. This paper will challenge this assumption by presenting a case study with third-year bachelor’s students who participated in a translation project. The students, enrolled in a course in translation practice, were trained in corpus consultation at the beginning of the academic year. Nearly at the end, they translated an extract of a supply contract without being trained in the legal field. They consulted a pre-compiled offline corpus and online bilingual dictionaries. The paper findings highlight that knowledge of the legal field would have certainly helped the students make more informed decisions and avoid some mistranslations. However, the major shortcomings were actually due to ineffective corpus or dictionary consultation. In particular, formulaic expressions and collocations were neglected. In light of the paper findings, it can be speculated that in translation training, effective corpus consultation may help users deliver high-quality legal translations. It also seemed that thorough knowledge of the legal field is not a prerequisite, at least as far as short texts are concerned.

Theo Padnos published My Life Had Stood A Loaded Gun in 2004, when Prison Studies were burgeoning and gaining academic attention globally. Neglected by critics, the book relates the author's experience as literature instructor in an American prison. Engaging methods of pedagogical research and reader-response criticism, the paper investigates the role of literature in the cultural activities of young male inmates in a medium security jail in Vermont. An original amalgam of crime reports, pedagogy of literature, and autobiographical criticism, Padnos' study for the first time confronts young criminals with a literary canon dripping with violence. The experiment sheds light on the reading activities of prisoners, on their and the author's social background, and on the power of American literature to speak to marginal groups.

Linguists argued that the Cockney dialect, in London, is expected to be replaced by Multicultural London English in the years to come. However, this does not imply that Cockney is dead, as recent research revealed that it just moved to Essex. This paper aims at examining whether (l) vocalisation, a common feature of Cockney, is still present in the London district of Bermondsey. Ten working-class English speakers, stratified by age and sex, have been recorded by means of sociolinguistic interviews. The results, discussed both quantitively and qualitatively, show that: (a) (l) vocalisation is present in all age cohorts, with young speakers favouring the non-standard feature; (b) preceding long vowels trigger (l) vocalisation.

The so-called indirect passive, where the subject is not the argument of the underlying verb that bears the Theme/Patient role, is generally understood to be a bi-clausal phenomenon (cf. Kuno 1973; Shibatani 1978; Kuroda 1979). In other words, the passive morpheme rare is merged with a clause, and then the resulting item is combined with the subject. In this paper, however, we argue that the indirect passive is best understood as a mono-clausal phenomenon. We first point out that with some instances of the indirect passive, the passive morpheme rare is not understood as being combined with a verb or clause in syntax. Thus, we are led to assume that the lexicon contains numerous instances of the Vrare form. This implies that even when the passive morpheme rare is combined in syntax, it forms a constituent with the relevant verb; hence, the indirect passive is a mono-clausal phenomenon. We furthermore maintain that when the indirect passive involves the merging of rare with a verb in syntax, the verb must be a volitional verb, and demonstrate that this generalization, as well as the case particle alternation involved in the indirect passive, poses a challenge to the bi-clause analysis but not to the mono-clause analysis. Finally, we review one of the main arguments for analyzing the indirect passive to be a bi-clausal phenomenon, which concerns the antecedent of zibun. We show that it is inconclusive at best.

The goal of this paper is to reconcile the definite marking with the indefinite-like semantics of those superlatives that take a relative/comparative reading. Following Szabolcsi (1986) and Heim (1999), we will assume that the difference between absolute and relative readings of superlatives is represented at the syntactic level of semantic representation, LF (Logical Form). We will however depart from Heim’s hypothesis that what raises at LF is the superlative operator itself (EST). We will instead assume a quantificational-determiner analysis of EST, which involves two raising operations at LF: EST-raising to Spec,DP and raising of the whole superlative DP (Determiner Phrase) to a scope position in the sentence. We will examine the relative readings of quality superlatives. The generalizations and the proposed analysis are not assumed to extend to quantity superlatives.

This paper analyses Angela Carter’s desecrating tendency to taboo-breaking in thematic and formal terms. By referring to her short-fiction production and focusing on “John Ford’s ’Tis Pity She’s a Whore", I intend to show how gender/patriarchal and genre/authorial taboos are similarly broken and transmuted into daringly subversive outcomes. In line with her feminist agenda and postmodern transformism, Carter superbly challenges, sabotages, violates, de- and re-constructs traditionally codified sexual and gender taboos by mimicking such reversals through new narrative solutions. If diversity, multiplicity and change guarantee the continuity of life, incest can easily metaphorise a taboo relationship based on repetition of the identical, sameness, and immobility, to be finally transformed, if not avoided. Consistent with many of her female characters’ incestuous relationships with parents or siblings, Carter also establishes incest-like relationships with previous authors and narrative discourses, which she predatorily appropriates. Carter’s resulting narrative testifies to the fact that taboos must be first experienced to be eventually broken. It is in the dialectic between rule and infraction, taboo and its violation that Carter’s writing is rooted, constantly looking for borders to be crossed.

Designed as a paper reflecting on the editorial mediation of early modern French literary texts, this article maps the educational activities conducted on the Tragiques Inventions site since 2020. In particular, it delves into the procedures linked to documenting, generating and manipulating descriptive and analytical (meta)data. A new concept of ‘hand-reading’ is being developed – the possibility of using digital technology to prioritize human intervention in the construction of knowledge through textual editing. This concept will bring a fresh perspective on early modern literary texts.

There is a substantial body of scholarship arguing for the relevance of magic realism to Toni Morrison’s fictional production, with one exception being her last novel God Help the Child, which, in that respect, has been remarkably overlooked. The present paper intends to fill this scholarly gap by focusing on what Morrison called “enchantment”, a powerful blend of magic and realism that she employed to represent a host of racial and ancestral issues of Blackness, often of a traumatic kind.

Sylvia’s Lovers is a novel about war. It is a historical novel set in the years 1793-1800 during the Napoleonic wars, and written by Elizabeth Gaskell in the years 1859-1862 when the American Civil War broke out, in April 1861. Examining Gaskell’s correspondence with Charles Eliot Norton in the years 1861-63 and the articles Norton wrote in support of the War and the anti-slavery cause, this paper explores the way in which the news coming from America and the debates on the contemporary events left a significant mark on the second part of the novel. The implied reference to the context of the American Civil War would shed new light on Gaskell’s narrative choices concerning the plot and the main male character’s development, which has been substantially overlooked.

Linguists argued that the Cockney dialect, in London, is expected to be replaced by Multicultural London English in the years to come. However, this does not imply that Cockney is dead, as recent research revealed that it just moved to Essex. This paper aims at examining whether (l) vocalisation, a common feature of Cockney, is still present in the London district of Bermondsey. Ten working-class English speakers, stratified by age and sex, have been recorded by means of sociolinguistic interviews. The results, discussed both quantitively and qualitatively, show that: (a) (l) vocalisation is present in all age cohorts, with young speakers favouring the non-standard feature; (b) preceding long vowels trigger (l) vocalisation.

The so-called indirect passive, where the subject is not the argument of the underlying verb that bears the Theme/Patient role, is generally understood to be a bi-clausal phenomenon (cf. Kuno 1973; Shibatani 1978; Kuroda 1979). In other words, the passive morpheme rare is merged with a clause, and then the resulting item is combined with the subject. In this paper, however, we argue that the indirect passive is best understood as a mono-clausal phenomenon. We first point out that with some instances of the indirect passive, the passive morpheme rare is not understood as being combined with a verb or clause in syntax. Thus, we are led to assume that the lexicon contains numerous instances of the Vrare form. This implies that even when the passive morpheme rare is combined in syntax, it forms a constituent with the relevant verb; hence, the indirect passive is a mono-clausal phenomenon. We furthermore maintain that when the indirect passive involves the merging of rare with a verb in syntax, the verb must be a volitional verb, and demonstrate that this generalization, as well as the case particle alternation involved in the indirect passive, poses a challenge to the bi-clause analysis but not to the mono-clause analysis. Finally, we review one of the main arguments for analyzing the indirect passive to be a bi-clausal phenomenon, which concerns the antecedent of zibun. We show that it is inconclusive at best.

The goal of this paper is to reconcile the definite marking with the indefinite-like semantics of those superlatives that take a relative/comparative reading. Following Szabolcsi (1986) and Heim (1999), we will assume that the difference between absolute and relative readings of superlatives is represented at the syntactic level of semantic representation, LF (Logical Form). We will however depart from Heim’s hypothesis that what raises at LF is the superlative operator itself (EST). We will instead assume a quantificational-determiner analysis of EST, which involves two raising operations at LF: EST-raising to Spec,DP and raising of the whole superlative DP (Determiner Phrase) to a scope position in the sentence. We will examine the relative readings of quality superlatives. The generalizations and the proposed analysis are not assumed to extend to quantity superlatives.

This paper analyses Angela Carter’s desecrating tendency to taboo-breaking in thematic and formal terms. By referring to her short-fiction production and focusing on “John Ford’s ’Tis Pity She’s a Whore", I intend to show how gender/patriarchal and genre/authorial taboos are similarly broken and transmuted into daringly subversive outcomes. In line with her feminist agenda and postmodern transformism, Carter superbly challenges, sabotages, violates, de- and re-constructs traditionally codified sexual and gender taboos by mimicking such reversals through new narrative solutions. If diversity, multiplicity and change guarantee the continuity of life, incest can easily metaphorise a taboo relationship based on repetition of the identical, sameness, and immobility, to be finally transformed, if not avoided. Consistent with many of her female characters’ incestuous relationships with parents or siblings, Carter also establishes incest-like relationships with previous authors and narrative discourses, which she predatorily appropriates. Carter’s resulting narrative testifies to the fact that taboos must be first experienced to be eventually broken. It is in the dialectic between rule and infraction, taboo and its violation that Carter’s writing is rooted, constantly looking for borders to be crossed.

Designed as a paper reflecting on the editorial mediation of early modern French literary texts, this article maps the educational activities conducted on the Tragiques Inventions site since 2020. In particular, it delves into the procedures linked to documenting, generating and manipulating descriptive and analytical (meta)data. A new concept of ‘hand-reading’ is being developed – the possibility of using digital technology to prioritize human intervention in the construction of knowledge through textual editing. This concept will bring a fresh perspective on early modern literary texts.

There is a substantial body of scholarship arguing for the relevance of magic realism to Toni Morrison’s fictional production, with one exception being her last novel God Help the Child, which, in that respect, has been remarkably overlooked. The present paper intends to fill this scholarly gap by focusing on what Morrison called “enchantment”, a powerful blend of magic and realism that she employed to represent a host of racial and ancestral issues of Blackness, often of a traumatic kind.

Theo Padnos published My Life Had Stood A Loaded Gun in 2004, when Prison Studies were burgeoning and gaining academic attention globally. Neglected by critics, the book relates the author's experience as literature instructor in an American prison. Engaging methods of pedagogical research and reader-response criticism, the paper investigates the role of literature in the cultural activities of young male inmates in a medium security jail in Vermont. An original amalgam of crime reports, pedagogy of literature, and autobiographical criticism, Padnos' study for the first time confronts young criminals with a literary canon dripping with violence. The experiment sheds light on the reading activities of prisoners, on their and the author's social background, and on the power of American literature to speak to marginal groups.

Sylvia’s Lovers is a novel about war. It is a historical novel set in the years 1793-1800 during the Napoleonic wars, and written by Elizabeth Gaskell in the years 1859-1862 when the American Civil War broke out, in April 1861. Examining Gaskell’s correspondence with Charles Eliot Norton in the years 1861-63 and the articles Norton wrote in support of the War and the anti-slavery cause, this paper explores the way in which the news coming from America and the debates on the contemporary events left a significant mark on the second part of the novel. The implied reference to the context of the American Civil War would shed new light on Gaskell’s narrative choices concerning the plot and the main male character’s development, which has been substantially overlooked.

My paper takes as its focus the semantic variation of the pre-modifying adjectives happy and glorious which resulted from the Glorious Revolution of 1688 and the subsequent triumphal representation of Britain as a champion of freedom and emancipation. By adopting principles of corpus-assisted discourse studies (Stubbs 2001; Partington 2004), I shall examine the collocational patterns of the two lexical items in the British periodical press, covering the period from 1620 to 1789. Before the Glorious Revolution the meaning of the two premodifiers appears consistent with the definitions provided in the OED but from 1688 onwards changes in the phraseology affect their semantics. In particular, after the Revolution, happy and glorious show a semantic preference for words referring to liberty and (universal) rights which enriches their meaning with a sense of freedom from oppression and corruption. Given that the two adjectives already had a positive meaning, the libertarian semantics acquired after 1688 can be interpreted as a further amelioration in the direction of liberalism and, at the end of the century, Enlightened universalism. In order to investigate the changing semantics of the two adjectives throughout the 17th and 18th centuries, I shall make use of the Florence Early English Newspapers Corpus (1620-1649), the Lancaster Newsbooks Corpus (1653-1654), the Zurich English Newspaper Corpus (1671, 1681, 1691) and the British Newspaper Archive for the period from 1700 to 1789.

This article focuses on a translation proposal of the novel Tropique de la violence by Nathacha Appanah. An analysis of the source text and a stylistic comparison between the different narrative voices are carried out, as well as an overview of the use of the neo-standard in Italian literature and Italian translation. By means of specific examples, this paper proposes to argue that the use of a marked language and the inclusion of grammatical and structural “errors” constitute a valid translation strategy for the rendering of the marked language of one of the five narrators of this novel.

In this paper we deal with linguistic and cultural otherness, as shown in the Italian translation of the French graphic novel L’Arabe du futur, by Riad Sattouf, an autobiographical saga taking place between France, Libya and Syria. Differences between comics and graphic novel are not clear-cut, the latter being above all an editorial label. Orality, cultural references and variational aspects are more and more studied, within the translation of graphic novel. Our analysis tries to shed light on some phenomena related to linguistic and cultural contact, as well as on their translation: the orality of non-Francophone speakers, diatopic variaiton, realia, brand names, multilingualism and its representations, code-mixing.

This paper explores the concept of legal translation as a Third Space through the lens of the ‘multilingual’ Court of Justice of the European Union (ECJ). In many ways legal translation at that Court fits readily with the characterisation of translation as a Third Space. Due to complex internal production processes the ECJ produces texts which are undoubtedly hybrid in nature, and which exhibit distinctive features on a lexical and textual level marking them out as a product of cross-fertilisation of influences from source and target languages and legal cultures. Even the teleological approach taken towards legal reasoning at the ECJ occupies a space outside the strict confines of the texts involved. Both the processes and the product of the ECJ’s language system appear to bear all the hallmarks of translation as a Third Space. However, translation at the ECJ also challenges the concept of a Third Space. The prevailing definitions of translation as a Third Space fail to effectively conceptualise additional nuances of the specific nature of drafting and the complex nature of translation at the ECJ. This paper uses original empirical data to demonstrate that translation at the ECJ places constraints on the undefined, vague and fluid nature of the Third Space, warping the forces at work within that space. In this regard, rather than an amorphous space, the Third Space is better thought of as a determinate area which is delimited by elements of translation process which constrain it. This adapted framing of the Third Space can consequently be used to better understand and illustrate the dynamics at play in other areas of legal translation where the current concept of the Third Space is equally inadequate for encompassing the specific nature of translation practices which impact on that space-in-between.

This paper mainly discusses the distribution and rhetorical functions of personal pronouns in English and Chinese legal news reports. Through the comparative analysis of some English and Chinese legal news texts, this paper finds the following points: English and Chinese legal news generally have two narrative types: objective narrative and semi-dialogic narrative. The differences in narrative type directly affect the distribution of personal pronouns. In objective narrative, the use of third person pronouns accounts for an absolute proportion, and the frequency of using first person and second person pronouns is close to zero. In semi-dialogic narrative, the use of third person pronouns is still the highest, but only slightly higher than the use of first person and second person pronouns, accounting for only a small number. After analysis, this paper holds that there are three reasons for the uneven distribution: first, the differences between the dialogic style and the narrative style; second, the legal narrative being a story narrative; third, the specific restrictions on the use of legal rhetoric.

Several are the European Directives dedicated to e-commerce, focussing on consumer rights, the distance marketing of consumer financial services and the protection of consumers in distance contracts. In contract law, the terms “termination”, “withdrawal” and “cancellation” have peculiar and distinct meaning. Nonetheless, they tend to be misused and applied interchangeably. This article will shed light on these relevant terms in the light of EU Directives on the protection of consumer rights in off-premises and distance contracts. To do so, it will first present instances in which the meaning and use of these terms is either clear-cut or somehow blurred. By analysing word usage and meaning in context, it will explore how EU Directives, and EU drafters in general, made (un)ambiguous distinctions. Then, it will investigate whether English-speaking drafters (such as those of the pre-Brexit UK, Ireland and Malta) made a consistent use of such terms. Finally, this paper will explore whether online conditions of sale written in English by non-English speaking sellers or traders (such as Italian and Polish) also make a consistent use of the terms. The paper findings highlight that the use and legal purpose of these terms in European Directives have not been particularly consistent over the years. Furthermore, Member States’ system-specificity has weighed on the meaning, application and scope of the terms. On the other hand, at EU level the absence of a unique legal system of reference and the challenges of harmonization may have created false equivalences.

This paper mainly discusses the distribution and rhetorical functions of personal pronouns in English and Chinese legal news reports. Through the comparative analysis of some English and Chinese legal news texts, this paper finds the following points: English and Chinese legal news generally have two narrative types: objective narrative and semi-dialogic narrative. The differences in narrative type directly affect the distribution of personal pronouns. In objective narrative, the use of third person pronouns accounts for an absolute proportion, and the frequency of using first person and second person pronouns is close to zero. In semi-dialogic narrative, the use of third person pronouns is still the highest, but only slightly higher than the use of first person and second person pronouns, accounting for only a small number. After analysis, this paper holds that there are three reasons for the uneven distribution: first, the differences between the dialogic style and the narrative style; second, the legal narrative being a story narrative; third, the specific restrictions on the use of legal rhetoric.

Several are the European Directives dedicated to e-commerce, focussing on consumer rights, the distance marketing of consumer financial services and the protection of consumers in distance contracts. In contract law, the terms “termination”, “withdrawal” and “cancellation” have peculiar and distinct meaning. Nonetheless, they tend to be misused and applied interchangeably. This article will shed light on these relevant terms in the light of EU Directives on the protection of consumer rights in off-premises and distance contracts. To do so, it will first present instances in which the meaning and use of these terms is either clear-cut or somehow blurred. By analysing word usage and meaning in context, it will explore how EU Directives, and EU drafters in general, made (un)ambiguous distinctions. Then, it will investigate whether English-speaking drafters (such as those of the pre-Brexit UK, Ireland and Malta) made a consistent use of such terms. Finally, this paper will explore whether online conditions of sale written in English by non-English speaking sellers or traders (such as Italian and Polish) also make a consistent use of the terms. The paper findings highlight that the use and legal purpose of these terms in European Directives have not been particularly consistent over the years. Furthermore, Member States’ system-specificity has weighed on the meaning, application and scope of the terms. On the other hand, at EU level the absence of a unique legal system of reference and the challenges of harmonization may have created false equivalences.

The aim of this paper is to present LEX.CH.IT, a corpus for micro-diachronic linguistic investigations of Swiss normative acts in Italian. Italian has a peculiar position as an official minority translation language within the Swiss institutional system. Until now, few studies have focused on Swiss legal Italian, but the academic interest has been growing over the last two decades. In order to further expand on research in this field, resources such as corpora are fundamental. This is why LEX.CH.IT has been compiled. This corpus was originally created in the context of a doctoral research project, which will be briefly outlined in this paper. The main goals of the project are to determine whether clarity is a feature of Swiss legislation in Italian, whether there have been relevant evolutions over the last five decades and to assess the role of translation for a clear legislation. In the future, LEX.CH.IT could also be useful for a number of other projects aiming to shed light on the features of this language variety.

Expansion of IT-media in every field of human activity is one of the essential characteristics of modern time. This paper aims at presenting the role of electronic media in teaching translation in the field of law at the University of Osijek, Croatia, and analysing their impact on the motivation of the target group of students in the teaching process. The paper endeavours to provide some insight into the modern teaching practice and to analyse the interconnectedness of the use of electronic media and student motivation rather than to present some empirical research in the field. In the first part of the paper, a theoretical approach to teaching legal translation today is offered. In the main part, teaching legal translation by using modern media is presented on the examples of the Lifelong Learning Programme for Lawyer-Linguists at the Faculty of Law Osijek, and the course on legal translation within the German Language and Literature Studies at the Faculty of Humanities and Social Sciences of Osijek. The usage of electronic media in translation teaching is discussed with reference to the courses Introduction to the Theory of Legal Translation and Online Translation Tools and EU Vocabulary. Specific types of online materials, translation tools and sources are discussed from the point of view of student motivation. New media are also discussed from the perspective of their efficiency at different stages of translation teaching. In the concluding part, application of modern technologies in teaching legal translation is compared with other teaching methods, approaches and techniques. Finally, the author questions using IT as motivation tools in the higher education teaching discourse and argues for application of “moderate approach” in the teaching of legal translation.