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Learner language varieties are characterised by common features, which are often found in learners of an L2 in distant and different contexts. This is the case of students of Italian L2 in Malta and in Alto Adige (Bolzano province), two contexts characterised by bilingualism where advanced L2 learners often resort to communication strategies when they write and speak in Italian. In some cases their linguistic and grammatical knowledge is superior to their pragmatic competence, thereby leading to the use of words and to the formulation of sentences which may be unsuitable within the context in which they are used. In this paper we present findings based on utterances purposely extracted from examination scripts. Attention is focussed on traits in which spoken forms are transposed into the written variety, on contact with the context language/s and on select morphosyntactic structures. Findings indicate that advanced learners of Italian L2, both in Malta and in Alto Adige, resort to their interlanguage skills to express complex notions and that this may also help them further develop their linguistic competences., peer-reviewed

This paper charts some of the taboos and prejudices surrounding the female voice and asks why it is so often the site of anxiety. It suggests that women's voices are commonly identified with the pre-verbal and the body; that in most cultures they connote sexual power and treachery and hence need to be policed. It also argues that the association of the female voice with the maternal voice plays a key role in heightening the anxiety produced by the speaking woman. After examining a number of responses to this problematised female voice - historical, cultural and individual - it ends by considering some ways in which contemporary female speakers and performers are challenging the norms and conventions that have characterised female vocality.

Audiovisual translation essentially refers to the translation of film and television products and it is texts of this type that the talk will focus on, while still recognising that phenomena such as interactive websites and mobile phone technology are rapidly expanding the field. The question of translation (or transposition, or transfer, or …) will be considered in the wide Jakobsonian sense of intralingual, interlingual and intersemiotic translation. The creation of audiovisual versions of film products for the deaf or for educational purposes come under the first category, while the standard practice of providing foreign language versions of said products is an interlingual exercise. The relatively new discipline of audiodescription, as a means of giving the blind access to audiovisual material, is more transparently intersemiotic. The paper will first concentrate on three facets that are fundamental to any understanding of what audiovisual translation entails. The question of multimodality, what a multimodal text consists of and how such texts can be analysed, and subsequently translated, will be followed by considerations relating to the existence or non-existence of the so-called ‘language of film’ or ‘filmese’. The results of experiments conducted at the University of Trieste and elsewhere will be used in the attempt to reach conclusions regarding this ever more controversial question. Thirdly the range of audiovisual translation techniques and strategies will be illustrated in order to move beyond the now sterile debate of ‘dubbing versus subtitling’ and thus to discuss some of the latest developments in the area. Audiovisual translation, after being described by Sergio Viaggio (1992: 27) as ‘the least studied of all branches of translation’ has taken its place as a vibrant sub-section of translation studies. There is now a substantial literature on the subject and interest is growing around the world. The scientific background underlying the talk ranges from systemic-functional linguistics to multimodal transcription, from phasal analysis to various aspects of ‘traditional’ translation theory. By the use of examples it is hoped to illustrate some of the main issues surrounding the discipline of audiovisual translation as it stands today in Italy and in the rest of the world.

This paper investigates macroscopic differences in the language of articles published in Italian newspapers translated from foreign languages compared to the language of articles originally written in Italian. To this end, a corpus was compiled of approximately 1 million tokens composed of two subcorpora (translated and original) weighted according to different criteria (length and number of articles, distribution in time, number of authors/translators). By means of text analysis software, analyses were conducted to identify language traits related to source language interference and translation universals.

This paper describes a work in progress which aims to demonstrate how one example of the specific domain of financial journalism is increasingly employing a more monologic authorial style, in which the writers communicate their knowledge and ideas, employing discourse structures which reduce or eliminate aspects of discourse which typically serve to create a textual relationship between writers and readers. The work arises from previous research in which the case was argued for considering the Lex column in the Financial Times (FT) as a genre in its own right (Anderson 2007), basing its definition of genre on Bhatia (1993), “a recognisable communicative event characterised by a set of communicative purpose(s) identified and mutually understood by the members of the professional or academic community in which it regularly occurs. Most often it is highly structured and conventionalised with constraints on allowable contributions in terms of their intent, positioning, form and functional value” (Bhatia; 1993:3). The Lex column has evolved stable discourse features which make it a recognisable communicative event and the textual pattern facilitates its communicative goals of analysis, comment and evaluation. During the research into the Lex column we noted a shift to an increasingly more authoritarian discourse style. In order to investigate whether this shift was also taking place in other established areas of financial journalism, we decided to analyse the editorial section from the FT.