Dictionary of translation science with terms of semiotics, textology, linguistics, stylistics

by bruno osimo and his students at ISIT - Fondazione scuole civiche di Milano.

please write to tell us what’s missing and to send contributions.

items without text are being written.

names in parenthesis are the contributors’.

"No leftover" principle

Abbreviation (neljubin)

Abduction (Veronica Mari) it is a kind of reasoning, sometimes also called "retroduction", aimed at retrogressively reconstruct the relationship between a rule and a result. It is complementary to the other two kinds of inference (deduction and induction) but "is the first step in scientific reasoning" (Peirce, 1931: 203) and the only one that can actually create new knowledge. In particular deduction is the process of deriving the consequences of what is assumed, for example: '"All bachelors are unmarried men". It is true by definition and does not depend on sense experience. On the other hand, induction is the process of inferring probable antecedents as a result of observing multiple consequences; for example, the statement "it is snowing outside" is invalid until one looks outside to see if it is true or not. Induction requires sense experience. At any rate we must take into account that Peirce’s writings are voluminous and fragmentary and there is disagreement over whether Peirce meant precisely the same thing by "abduction" and "retroduction". In translation, abductive reasoning allows translation critics to formulate hypotheses that, although not very probable, have a strong creative impact and can then be checked in what remains of the text. When reading, we continually make conjectures about what the text leaves unsaid. Byabduction we make hypotheses on the author that wrote it, on their writing strategy, on the characters, on what brings them to behave in a certain way. As in the solving of a riddle, some possible solutions have repercussions on other parts of the whole interpretation, in some cases confirming them, in others denying them. Critical reading is an abductive game that, in the case of translation, has somewhat complex features. The applications of Peirce’s notion of "abduction" in the field of translation criticism can be viewed in these terms: 1) there is a first degree of abductive reconstruction applied to literary criticism, that is to say abduction about the author, attempts to infer the narrative strategy; 2) a second degree of abduction is translation, a process in which it is necessary to make conjectures both on the author and on the model reader of the metatext, to elaborate a strategy used instead of the narrative strategy of the prototext; 3) the third degree operates in the case of translation criticism where, on the basis of a second-degree result (the translation of a prototext), conjectures go beyond the author (first degree), the metatext (second degree), the translator and the translation strategy (third degree). Eco (1983) describes abduction as the search for a general rule from which a specific case would follow. He identifies three kinds of abduction: 1) given a specific case, the reasoner may be aware of only one general rule from which that case would follow, “Hypothesis or overcoded abduction”; 2) if there are multiple general rules to be selected from, Eco calls the abduction “undercoded abduction”; 3) if the reasoner does not know general rules that imply the specific case, it is possible to make up a new one. This act of invention can also occur when the general rules known by the reasoner would lead to unsatisfactory explanations. An abduction that involves the invention of a new rule is called “creative abduction”.

Aberrant decoding (Miraglia): concept introduced by Umberto Eco in 1968, which is strictly related to those ofmodel reader, empirical reader, open text and closed text. Though the adjective “aberrant” is employed, it doesn’t mean that the decoding produced is awful or totally wrong. What Eco means by “aberrant decoding” is, in fact, a reader’s interpretation of the text that the author had not foreseen. Depending on the strategy employed by the author, a text can be interpreted in a number of ways or in just one way. When writing, indeed, the author usually imagines the model reader he wants his text to be addressed to, and produces a text which can be closed or open. A closed text implies  just the one interpretation foreseen by its author. On the contrary, an open text implies that more interpretations of the text can be given. Every interpretation of a closed text not expected by the author is considered “illegitimate”. Anyway, what Eco argues is that closed texts are the most 'open'. As a matter of fact, the narrower a narrative strategy, the more probabilities there are for the text to be subject to unforeseen decoding, which actually makes these texts extremely open.  By contrast, when the range of model readers is wider, the several decodings by the different empirical readers have a much higher chance to be legitimate, while the possibilities of aberrant decoding are abundantly lower. Aberrant decodings, of course, occur because of various factors affecting the reader’s interpretation of a text. Some of the more common 'deviating' factors are: private biases, deviating circumstances, aleatory connotations, interpretive failures, personal encyclopedia and communication loss. By the way, it should be noted that aberrant decodings may provide interpretations that, though not foreseen, are possible, or even more appropriate than those the author had figured out.

Absolute translation

Abstract translation

Abusive translation (Virginia Cavalletti)

Acceptability (Miraglia): one of the two elements of the dichotomy adequacy/acceptability introduced by the Israeli scholar Gideon Toury. This dichotomy is strictly related to the first kind of translation norms Toury identified, that is to say "initial norms". As Leuven-Zwart said, by "initial norms" Toury meant “the translator’s (conscious or unconscious) choice as to the main objective of his translation, the objective which governs all decisions made during the translation process”. The dichotomy is based on the translator’s subjection to the norms coming from the prototext or to those coming from the metatext. In the former case, the translation will tend toward adequacy, while in the latter it will tend toward acceptability. In other words, according to Toury’s distinction, adequacy is the adherence to source text norms, while acceptability is the adherence to norms originating in the target culture. Of course, since these two concepts imply that translation has to be seen as a social activity within a given society or culture, the translator decides to follow the norms of either the transmitting or the receiving culture. At this point, it is very useful to mention Even-Zohar’s polysystem theory, which helps explaining how the status of the translated literature in the receiving culture determines the translation strategies that are employed. If the position of the translated literature is primary, the translator will focus on adequacy, while if its position is secondary, he will focus on acceptability. More concretely, acceptability is a principle of translation according to which a translated text is converted in complete accordance with the linguistic and cultural norms of the target language. So, the translator will choose the readability of the metatext as its dominant, and his work will be characterized by the modification of all the cultural elements of the prototext, by replacing them with elements belonging to the receiving culture or with standard elements. Acceptable translations are far easier to read, but they are also the ones that give the smallest contribution to mutual cultural enrichment.

Accuracy (Resmini): term used in translation evaluation indicating the extent to which a translation matches the prototext. It usually refers to the preservation of the information content of the prototext in the metatext; to be accurate, a translation has to be generally literal rather than free, so the actual meaning of “accuracy”, as regards a given translation, must depend on the type of 'equivalence' found in the translation. To establish the accuracy of a translation is very difficult: this procedure has to be carried out “unit by unit at the level of the phrase, clause, sentence, paragraph and the whole text” (Sager, 1994:148). Departures from strict accuracy are generally considered as shortcomings; however, to deviate from the prototext is often inevitable above all in the translation of literary texts, where translators have to introduce shifts to reproduce the prototext “in its totality, as an organic whole” (Popovič 1970:80).

Achronization (Virginia Cavalletti) The word "achronization" comes from Greek α- + χρóνος [a + kronos] “without time”. In translation, achronization is the omission of any element that could connect the text to a precise temporal chronotope. It is to time what atopization is to space. Achronization is also one of the micro-structural shifts in van Leuven-Zwart’s comparative model. When translating a text, it is necessary to consider the possible shifts between the PT and the MT. Van Leuven-Zwart’s model aims at describing shifts in very small text units (like words), without considering the textual context. She identifies three kinds of relationship that can occur between one element of the PT and one of the MT: contrast, and modulation. "Contrast" is produced when an element of the PT is transformed in the MT so that it is no more recognizable; "modulation" or "binary change" is the modification of an element according to a dichotomy along the continuum generalization vs. specification. A "non-binary shift" occurs when there is no dichotomy but many possibilities among which the MT element can be chosen. Achronization is one of the subcategories of modulation ― the other two being historization and modernization ― concerning time. More precisely, it is a generalization of time.

Actualization (Federica Montagnoli) this term has two important meanings in translation studies. Firstly, it refers to each process where the prototext is actualized, i.e. turned into another text different from the original one or into another form. It is always an intersemiotic process, because the source and the target text have two different codes. Here are some examples: “the actualization of a script” means that the source text, made up of words and phrases, has been turned into an acted film or a play which is made up of words, music, images, gestures and actions; “the actualization of a song” means that the lyrics are rendered by the singer: in this case, the prototext is a written text, whereas the metatext is an oral text, whereby not only words, but also sounds, voice timbre and  expressiveness play an important role; “the actualization of a dream” is the act of telling someone a dream, in other words the act of turning mental pictures into words. If we consider all the stages of the translation process, every translation can be defined as an intersemiotic process, because the prototext is turned into mental information in the form of inner language and then expressed in written words. The second meaning of this term indicates a translation strategy on the diachronic axis that involves Bakhtin’s concept of time chronotope: the translator chooses to adapt the metatext to the current situation of the receiving culture, without preserving historical elements of the prototext. See alsomodernization.

Adaptation (Simona Rolleri): This term has undergone great changes in meaning and fortune during the centuries. A modern and objective definition of “adaptation” was given by Vinay and Darbelnet (1958): “adaptation is a procedure which can be used whenever the context referred to in the prototext does not exist in the culture of themetatext, thereby necessitating some form of re-creation”. Thus, the procedure of adaptation aims at achieving an 'equivalence' of situations whenever a cultural gap between prototext and metatext defies comprehension. The most common kinds of adaptation are local and global adaptation. The former is required when problems come up from the prototext itself and concern just some parts of it; the latter is required when it’s the outside context to cause translation problems, and the prototext needs therefore a global revision. Adaptation is based on adequacy and acceptability, and regards the relationship established between the emitting and receiving cultures within the cultural polysystem. The divide between translation and adaptation dates back to the Latin tradition, when Cicero and Horace analyzed adaptation in relation to the concept of translation as a more 'faithful' mode of transfer. The golden age of adaptation was in the XVII and XVIII Centuries, the epoch of the belles infidèles, while the XIX Century saw the reaction to this ‘infidelity’, to this violation of the prototext and to this 'betrayal' of the original author. In the XX Century, the transparency required in the translation of technical, scientific and commercial texts has legitimated a form of adaptation that is necessary in order to preserve the global message and the purpose of the prototext as well as a communication balance between the author and a foreign readership. Adaptation is also regarded as a form of translation characteristic of particular genres, such as drama, advertising, subtitling and children’s literature, whose aim is actually to achieve the same effect of the prototext on an audience with a different cultural background. Adaptation is especially applied to handbooks, where it “has to be based on the translator’s judgement about his/her readers’ knowledge” (Routledge, 1998). Any interlingual translation is ultimately a form of adaptation to the target culture.
Adequacy (Miraglia): one of the two elements of the dichotomy adequacy/acceptability introduced by the Israeli scholar Gideon Toury. These terms refer to the two orientations that translators can give to their metatext. As the German philosopher F. Schleiermacher declared during a lecture in 1813: "there are only two. Either the translator leaves the author in peace, as much as possible, and moves the reader towards him, or he leaves the reader in peace, as much as possible, and moves the author towards him." Adequacy corresponds to the first method he mentions. In terms of translation as cultural mediation, the reader has to move toward the prototext as an element of the transmitting culture. This approach is an important contribution to the cultural exchange, as many specific elements of the transmitting culture are preserved in the metatext. The prototext is so perceived as an expression of the transmitting culture, and the translator should help the readers fill the chronotopic distance between the prototext and themselves. While reading, indeed, the reader has to face an uneasy text where realia are maintained, proper names are not adapted, the deictics remain the same, the syntactic structures are reproduced as they are  ̶  wheter they are standard or marked  ̶  the meter of the transmitting culture is imported and the proverbs and idioms are preserved  ̶  if they are difficult to understand, they will be explained in the metatextual apparatus. In short, when an adequate translation is published, a text belonging to the transmitting culture enters the receiving culture and enriches it, though it requires a little extra effort from the reader. 

Adequate translation: it aims at conveying in the metatext the exact form and content of the prototext. It represents also the commitment of the translator to reproduce exactly all the historical and national peculiarities of the prototext (Toper 1995: 95). It is a trend to a wider sense of faithfulness which developed in the first decades of the 17^th century, when an agreement was reached for the first time among translators on the fact that any translations had to maintain the invariant information of the prototext. The concept of "adequate translation" developed as a consequence of the spreading of technical, scientific and documentary translation, that in Ancient Times had been almost unknown, or so unusual that it could by no means influence the aesthetic sense of literary translation. On the contrary between the 18^th and the 19^th century technical translation was very important for social life. It only aimed at the accuracy of the content with no regard for its form (Cary 1956). This new conception was so widespread that it also influenced the field of literary translation. Thanks to the Soviet School of Translation, which gave the name to this historical type of translation (Smirnov, Alekseev 1934), the adequate translation was further improved. The theory and the practice of the adequate translation implied for the first time two important questions: is it possible to obtain a metatext equivalent to the prototext? And if so, how? These are still the fundamental questions of the modern Translation Studies.

Adjustment

Aesthetic-Poetic translation (ivan ferrari)

Agent

Aging of translations (Claudia Natarelli): the same prototext can be re-translated many times over the years for different reasons. The most obvious one, is that the language of the previous version has become obsolete, but it is not the only cause. According to Osimo (2004:38), analysing different translations of the same prototext into the same language in a certain lapse of time, it is possible to infer the cultural development of that period, the aversions of the single translators, the social taboos, the socio-cultural influences and the lexical trends. When we talk about dated translations, we have to take into account that, beyond the aging of the language, there are also readers and critics that need and are curious to consult another version, another point of view on the original text. Concerning the facility with which a translation becomes “dated”, Popovič focuses on the specific nature of the translatory communicative act: “The seriality of the translation as mode of its existence as compared to the completeness of the original creative work is a dangerous propriety. Due to its more elevated degree of ‘openness’, a translation is sooner subject to aging. It can find itself excluded from the literary ‘swim’. This fact also determines the place of the translation within the literary process” (Popovič 1975: 128). According to him, it is the re-translation itself that highlights the aging of a previous translation. “In other words, it would be the appearance of a new version of a given prototext to emphasize the deficiency and the translation loss implied by a previous version and until that point considered as ‘canonical’, wholly accepted as ‘representing" that prototext’” (Osimo 2000-2004, 4). Osimo states that “the cause of aging must be sought in the circumstance upon which the translation’s language and style depend on the expressive canon effective at the moment the translation is done. The receiver also abides by such a canon, the receiver being, in the case of translation, the group of readers, among whom also is found the "proto-reader", i.e. the translator. The receiver evaluates the translation both in comparison to previous actualizations of the same prototext in the receiving language, and in relation to the original”. According to Toury, translations tend to age more quickly when the translators adopt the acceptability strategy: the metatext is created for contemporary readers, therefore, its requisites are dictated by the criteria of acceptability of a given generation of readers and critics. Actually, the aging of a translation is not an absolute phenomenon, it is a relative one: “Examples taken from practice show that readers are interested also in the oldest translations. In them there is the attraction of what is old, a sort of archaic gloss, the same of the prototexts of antique origin” (Popovič 1975: 129). So, “the acceptability canon of readers of each generation determines, depending on its historical moment, a given readers’ propensity for given types of loss […] translation is the communicative act that is a repeatable, bearer of loss, in relation to which a reader’s taste can also be expressed ex negativo: and the predilection of one version as compared to the others is also a predilection for a given loss of the message’s content as compared to other losses represented in other versions, be they real or potential” (Osimo 2000-2004, 4). Aging of translations also induces Popovič (1975) to reflect on the way in which a culture receives a translated text (129). On this subject, Osimo (2000-2004, 5) states that “the fact that, for example, the translation of a classical work done a century ago can be considered no longer readable and therefore the use of a new more ‘modern’ translation indicates that the reception canon of a culture is a determining factor, that the canon could be different (and is so in different countries), and changes with time. A contrastive diachronic approach […] is a way to overcome the obstacle that the critic finds owing to the cultural implicit". “The comparison between the published versions and the original texts is the best method to elaborate a general and particular theory of translation” (Gak 1979, quoted by Torop 1995: 159).
Alien culture in the metatext alessandra porchera Torop calls “metatext” all the paratextual information about the author and the context in which the text is born including introductions, notes, prefaces, postfaces, reviews, etc; while according to the Tartu school terminology, where the original text is called “prototext”, the metatext is referred to as the “translated text”. This double meaning of the same word is justified by the fact that both the metatext (1) and the metatext (2) are the result of a translation process aiming at transforming the original prototext. In addition, as the metatextual translation is part of the processes taken into consideration by the total translation concept, both the results of the process of translation can be referred to as metatext. (Osimo 2004:30) Translators have the function to represent the “border culture” between the ‘alien’ culture and the receiving culture because they know the differences between them, they have a metacultural consciousness. When translating they can decide to insert the alien element in their culture as it is or to adapt it to their culture. The first attitude is centripetal, recognizes the differences carried by alien elements and compares them with the internal culture, encouraging the awareness of cultural differences; the second one is centrifugal and projects outside its internal system the perceptive schemes it uses and it is not curious toward diversity. The Israeli scholar Itamar Even Zohar studied the relationship between cultural systems introducing the concept of “literary polysystem”. Even Zohar calls “polysystem” the whole universe of semiosis, and describes some norms regulating the relationships between systems inside the polysystem, according to their central or peripheral position and their static or dynamic attitude. The central system is the one which influences the more the others while peripheral systems are less self-sufficient, more dynamic and tend to be influenced by central systems. In central systems translated texts are marginal, while in peripheral system they are central. Cultural centrality or marginality relationships influence the translation strategy. When the source culture is central and the receiving culture is peripheral the alien element is preserved. Instead, when the source culture is peripheral and the receiving culture is central the appropriation of the alien element is more frequent. (Osimo 2004:44) Even if they are difficult to understand, the elements belonging to an external culture contribute to enrich the receiving culture in which they are introduced; on the contrary, when an exotic element is adapted to the receiving culture it is made unrecognizable to the reader. In this regard, the Israeli researcher Gideon Toury gave an important contribution, introducing the notion of “adequacy” and “acceptability”. In the case of adequacy the dominant is the preservation of the integrity of the prototext, while in the case of acceptability the dominant is the readability of the translated prototext in the receiving culture. "If the principle or norm of adequacy is applied, a translator concentrates on the distinguishing features of the original text: its language, its style and its specific culture-bound elements. If the principle of acceptability prevails, the translator's aim is to produce a comprehensible text in which language and style are fully in accordance with the target culture's linguistic and literary conventions. The two principles do not exclude each other: a translator may pursue both norms at the same time". (van Leuven-Zwart:93). In other words, Toury defines adequacy as “translation of literary prototexts” and acceptability as “creation of literary metatexts” (it isn’t sure that the metatexts created in this way are the translations of the prototexts) (Toury 1993). Choosing adequacy texts can result difficult for readers, while acceptability risks to give readers the illusion that all cultures are similar to their own (Osimo 2004:59).

Alliteration (gloria mondellini) is the repetition of consonant sounds at the beginning of words or stressed syllables. The term is sometimes applied to the repetition of any sound, whether a vowel (assonance) or a consonant (consonance), in any position within the words (Encyclopædia Britannica 2009). Assonance is used to create internal rhyming within phrases or sentences, and together with alliteration and consonance serves as one of the building blocks of verse. The repetition of vowels is more a feature of verse than prose and can also be frequent in proverbs, often a form of short poetry (Encyclopædia Britannica 2009). Consonance is a stylistic device often used in poetry and characterized by the repetition of two or more consonants, whereas vowels are different. Alliteration differs from consonance insofar as the former requires the repeated consonant sound to be at the beginning of each word, while in the latter the repeated sounds can occur anywhere within the word, although often at the end (Encyclopædia Britannica 2009). In poetry half rhyme is due to the repetition of the final consonant of the words involved. A particular type of consonance known as “sibilance” concerns a series of sibilant sounds (/s/ and /sh/ for example). Alliteration may also include the use of different consonants with similar properties (labials, dentals, etc.). Apart from assonance and consonance there are other types of alliteration: 1) parallel or cross alliteration which involves the repetition of interwoven consonants (big time/bus trip); 2) hidden or internal alliteration as regards consonants in the middle of words (runner/flannel); 3) bracket alliteration which concerns initial and final consonants (grain/groin); 4) submerged or thesis alliteration where unstressed syllables of words are repeated (mailbox/carob); 5) suspended alliteration which refers to the reversal of a consonant-vowel combination found in one word in another word that follows (tawny/aeronautics) (Druri, Gioia 2005). Alliteration is a common literary or rhetorical device in all languages, although its accidental occurrence is often considered a defect. The relative formal accessibility of alliteration makes it one of the most commonly used literary tools. This rhetorical device seems to retain an important, though perhaps more subtle, part in modern poetry. In prosody alliterative verse uses alliteration as the principal structuring device to unify lines of poetry, as opposed to other devices such as rhyme. The most commonly studied traditions of alliterative verse are those found in the oldest literature of many Germanic languages (Encyclopædia Britannica 2009). The Old English epic Beowulf, as well as most other Old English poems, uses alliterative verse. It can be found in many other languages as well, although rarely with the systematic rigor of the Germanic forms. Like rhyme, alliteration is a great help to memory (Nellen 2008). It survives in magazine article titles, advertisements and business names (Coffee Corner), comic strip or cartoon characters (Donald Duck, Mickey Mouse), common expressions (busy as a bee) and books aimed at young readers, as it captures the children's interest. It is important to remember an essential difference between alliteration/assonance and onomatopoeia. Alliteration and assonance do not involve an imitation of sounds (unless they happen to coincide with onomatopoeia). Every time alliteration recurs in a text it coincides with a vital moment in the narrative, so that it very soon acquires emphatic force, underlining crucial textual and thematic points. A major strategic decision for the translator of a text characterized by alliteration arises on the phonic/graphic level, but affects also the grammatical one. This decision is whether to create a corresponding pattern of lexical items in the metatext to underline the crucial parts of the text and, if so, whether to make systematic phonic/graphic recurrences the hub of that metatext pattern. The phonic qualities (sound-symbolism) of a text, such as alliteration and onomatopoeia, play such an important textual role that translating the text without some attempt at producing appropriate sound-symbolic effects in the metatext would mean incurring severe translation loss. The more a text depends for its very existence on the interplay of onomatopoeia, alliteration and assonance, the more difficult the translator’s task becomes because sound symbolism is not only language-specific, but a very subjective matter as well. The translator isn’t obliged, or even well-advised, to reproduce the phonic qualities of the prototext. A translation technique known as “phonemic translation” concentrates on sounds and allows the sense to emerge as a kind of vaguely suggested impression (Hervey, Higgins, Loughridge 1995).

Analogical form

Analysis sguinzo

Anaphora (Irene Pozzi): this term comes from the ancient Greek ἀναφορά, “carrying back”. In linguistic terms, it refers to the coreference of one expression with an antecedent word. The antecedent expressions provides the information necessary to interpret the anaphoric element. That is why anaphora is also defined as an expression “referring” back to its antecedent. A simple example of anaphora is: “Paul asked Flora to pass him the book”, where him is an anaphoric pronoun referring back to Paul. However, in poetry, the term “anaphora” is used to describe a figure of speech in which a word or an expression is repeated at the beginning of neighbouring phrases, clauses, sentences or verses in order to obtain rhetorical or poetic effect. An illustrious example of poetic anaphora is Shakespeare’s “Mad world! Mad kings! Mad composition!” from King John. Anaphora is a form of endophora and is traditionally opposed to cataphora.

Annotation 

Appeal-focused texts, see Operative texts

Applied translation studies (Daniela Orsolin) is a branch of translation studies (other branches: descriptive translation studies and theoretical translation studies) that includes translator training, translation aids, translation policy, translation criticism (Holmes 1988). According to Wilss (1996), translation is a particular form of information processing consisting of many different dimensions which are not easily teachable and/or learnable – contrary to e.g. grammar. In his opinion, the general aim of translation is to facilitate communication between individuals with different cultural, linguistic or communication backgrounds. The process of translation can either be studied in a more theoretical way, e.g. by analysing translation processes and elaborating translation models, or with a more practical approach consisting in the transposition of the theoretical findings into programs aiming for practical use (Wilss 1996:3-4). The necessity of a practical approach is due to the fact that translators nowadays are facing an increasing number of specialized texts (about 90%), they are forced by the market to work rapidly and, therefore, have to increase their efficiency. The major problem of applied translation studies is the impossibility to formulate minimal standard requirements for translators and – connected to this fact – the inexistence of a standardized certificate for translators (Wilss 1996:10). In addition, educational institutions struggle with the organization of their course of studies because they cannot orientate to employers’ needs (the spectrum of subjects is too vast) but have to find a middle course which includes average standards of all kind of translation services. To better organize higher education of translators, Wilss suggests creating areas of competence in types of text – e.g. translation of children’s book, translation of specialized texts, audiovisual translation etc – and in the direction of translation: either into or from the translator’s mother tongue.

Archaism / archaicism: An archaism is the use of a form of speech or writing that is no longer current. It can be a word, a phrase or the use of spelling, letters, syntax, formula or as part of a specific jargon that have passed out of use. The compound adverbs and prepositions found in the writing of lawyers (e.g. heretofore, hereunto, thereof) are examples of archaisms as a form of jargon. This can either be done deliberately for instance to achieve a specific effect, e.g. ‘Ye Olde Tea Shoppe’ is a spelling archaism, used to suggest a traditional English atmosphere. Archaisms are most frequently encountered in poetry, law, and ritual writing and speech or nursery rhymes. Archaisms are kept alive by ritual and literary uses and by the study of older literature. The examples of archaism are: the use of the archaic familiar second person singular pronoun “thou” (the singular form of “you”) to refer to God in English Christianity or “spake” is an archaic form of the past tense of the verb “speak”. “There” is a modern form of “thither”, we use “to it” instead of “thereto”; “of which”, “of this” in place of “whereof”, “hereof”; “till then” or “up to that time” instead of “theretofore” or “except”-“save”; “perhaps”-“perchance”; “ before”- “ere”; “though”-“albeit”.”The archaicism was not a phenomenon of vocabulary alone, but a complex of historical factors, impossible to isolate” (Steiner 1975:367). “In seeking to penetrate the sense and logic of form of the original, the translator proceeds archeologically or aetiologically. He attempts to work back to the rudiments and first causes of invention in his author. … Master translations domesticate the foreign original by exchanging an obtrusive geographical-linguistic distance for a much subtler, internalized distance in time” (Steiner 1975:365).

Archiseme (and its translation) marilena zardoni

Architext

Architranseme (Valeria Crea): in Leuven-Zwart’s translation shift model, it is the common denominator between prototranseme and metatranseme, i.e. the invariant core sense of the  prototext and metatext transeme. For example, between “mettersi a sedere” (Italian) and “se enderezó” (Spanish), the architranseme is “to sit”.  Even if it isn’t always easy to recognize an architranseme , "practice shows that in most cases an architranseme can be identified with the help of a good descriptive dictionary in the two languages involved" (Leuven-Zwart 1989: 158).

Area-restricted theories of translation

Artificial language: it denotes any language, whose phonology, grammar, sintax, semantics and/or vocabulary was deliberately created by a group of people in order to reach certain purposes otherwise not achieavable using natural languages. There are thousands of artificial languages designed for different purposes. Programming languages, for example, differ from the others because they are not used for interaction between people; they are used instead between machines or to allow humans to give instructions to machines. The realm of artificial languages also includes logical languages, number languages, symbolic languages or the so called Manually Coded Languages or Sign Languages (used in deaf communities).

Atopization: the word ''atopy'' means ''placelessness'' in Greek (a- = without, topo- = place). Atopization refers to the spatial chronotope. It is part of a translation strategy called “neutralization”. Atopization is a strategy which consists in modifying the metatext by eliminating any geographical landmarks and reference to specific places belonging to the transmitting or receiving culture, in order to make it geographically ‘neutral’. This kind of editing or translation has to be stated explicitly by the translator, according to the ISO norm 2384 (1977).

Audio-medial text, see Multi-medial texts

Authorial metatext

Automatic translation, see Machine translation (Silvia De Ponti)

Autometatext (Valeria Crea) : metatext produced by the same author of the prototext; it is the result of an autotranslation. The presence of a single author for two different texts doesn’t mean that the autometatext is identical to the prototext. It is often the consequence of the author’s bilingualism, which represents a sort of communicative channel opening a closed, univocal text towards the new receivers. The author doesn’t produce the metatext for themselves, but they address the communication to their readers. This is the case of the Slovak writer Jonáš Záborský, who would have translated his works in Hungarian if the political situation of the 1860s had not allowed their publication in Slovak. In the end, Záborský didn’t translate his works, but if he had, he would have changed the original ideological and aesthetical code according to the Hungarian culture and the receivers’ expectations and the demands of the Austro-Hungarian censorship (Popovič 2007:40). According to the Russian scholar Finkel’ (1962) an autometatext is the best actualization of the prototext conceived by the author, and the author becomes the best translator of their work (Popovič 2007:41). But if in the case of a “normal” metatext a certain number of textual changes are expected, in the case of an autometatext they may be seen as defects. In her attempt to study the intertextual strategy on the special textual level which combines the intertextual and the ideological, the German scholar Renate Lachmann (1989) suggests that an autometatext may also be regarded as an implicit metatext: “The implicit text refers to itself and this way constitutes its own metatext” (quoted in Petrilli 2003:278).

Autonomy spectrum

Autotranslation (or Selftranslation): Many authors have written in two languages, usually first in their native language and in the language of the country to which they moved (often after emigration). It is possible to extrapolate from Beajour’s (1989:51) view of self-translation as “a rite of passage endured by almost all writers who ultimately work in a language other than the one in which they have first defined themselves as writers. Self-translation is the pivotal point in a trajectory shared by most bilingual writers.” The distinction between original and self-translation therefore collapses, giving place to a more flexible terminology in which both texts referred as “variants” or “versions” of equal status (Fitch 1988:132-3). It also becomes deciding to investigate the type of relationship that exists between the two languages in the personal history and formation of the author. Fitch (1985) says that the existence of a work of self-translation, which involves the fact that the author works on his own writing, makes the work virtually incomplete. In other words, the complete work can only be represented by both pieces of writing together. Fitch's intelligent observation is followed by fanciful observations: the two texts are in some way to be considered variations of each other. According to Fitch, it is not the re-production of a product that is so important, but the repetition of a process.

Back translation (magnaghi): it is the translation of a text, that has already been translated into a foreign language back to the original language. The back-translation should not be done by the same translator because the they could be influenced too much by their work. After the back-translation, the original and back-translated texts can be compared to see which are the points of divergence and the common ones (Metagora). It's almost impossible to obtain a back-translated text equal to the original one (Osimo 2004: 234).

Belles infidèles (aina+miraglia) this expression was first introduced around 1654 by the French philosopher and writer Gilles Ménage to refer to the translations by Nicolas Perrot d'Ablancourt (1606-1664). The early part of the seventeenth century was the great age of French Classicism and translations were increasingly expected to conform to the literary canons of the day. The free dynamic translations known as ‘Les Belles Infidèles’ aimed to provide target texts which were pleasant to read, and this continued to be a dominant feature of translation into French in the eighteenth century. Classical authors were reproduced according to current French literary fashion and morality (Baker 1998: 411). Translators tried to modify the works written by Greek and Latin authors in order to make them beautiful in the receiving language and culture. Therefore, they avoided to translate the swearwords, the erotic elements and all the things that could upset the reader and actualized the historical references. In short, these translations aimed to adapt the prototexts to the standards of the French culture. “One of the main figures to adopt this approach was Nicolas Perrot D’Ablancourt (1606-1664), who adapted classical texts to current canons and genres (through omissions and ‘improvements’) to such an extent that some of his translations are considered travesties of their originals” (Baker 1998: 412). “D’Ablancourt initiated a translation tradition whose products were soon labeled ‘Les Belles Infidèles’, beautiful but unfaithful. His ideas gained prestige from his membership in the Académie Française, and throughout the eighteen century they were given diverse formulations and applications, some more extreme than others” (Venuti 2000: 17). In 1681, Monsieur de la Valterie published a prose translation of Homeric verse. In a commentary accompanying the translation, he justified his adaptation of ancient customs in terms of propriety and, paradoxically, faithfulness to the author “who did not intend to offend the reader” (Mounin 1955: 62). Several essays on the principles of translation were written to justify this approach. Despite the fact that translators of the late seventeenth century paid more attention to the question of faithfulness to the source, the main priority continued to be providing texts which may appeal to the French reader (Baker 1998: 412). Pierre le Tourneur prefaced his version of Edward Young’s Night Thoughts (1769) by stating his “intention to distill from the English Young a French one to be read with pleasure and interest by French readers who would not have to ask themselves whether the book they were reading was a copy or an original” (Lefevere 1992: 39). “Le Tourneur’s comment was remarkable for its conceptual sleight of hand. It did not distinguish between a translation that produces an effect equivalent to that of the foreign text and a translation that produces the illusion of originality by effacing its translated status. The tradition of ‘Les Belles Infidèles’ repeatedly collapsed this distinction, asserting a correspondence to the foreign author’s intention or to the essential meaning of the foreign text while performing revisions that answered to what was intelligible and interesting in French culture. The sheer familiarity of the translation, of its language and style, enabled it to seem transparent and thereby pass for the original” (Venuti 2000: 307). However, as pointed out by Ballard (1992: 150), the Belles Infidèles approach was not universally accepted. In parallel with the literary trend of the Belles Infidèles, more literal approaches were put forward by Lemaistre de Sacy (1613-1684), who translated a Latin version of the Bible into French, and Pierre-Daniel Huet (1630-1721), who, in De Interpretatione (1661), urged the translator to show humility towards the source text (Baker 1998: 412). The earlier notion of translation being unfaithful to the original was questioned by Feminist Translation Theorists, led by Lori Chamberlain (Das 2005: 127). Chamberlain pointed out that the sexualization of translation appeared most familiarly in the tag ‘Les Belles Infidèles’ – like women, translations should be either beautiful or faithful. “This tag owes its longevity – it was coined in the seventeenth century – to more than phonetic similarity; what gives it the appearance of truth is that it has captured a cultural complicity between the issue of fidelity in translation and in marriage” (Venuti 2000: 307). For ‘Les Belles Infidèles’, fidelity is defined by an implicit contract between translation (as woman) an original (as husband, father, or author). “However, the infamous “double standard” operates here as it might have in traditional marriages: the “unfaithful” wife/translation is publicly tried for crimes the husband/original is by law incapable of committing. This contract, in short, makes it impossible for the original to be guilty of infidelity” (Venuti 2000: 307). Chamberlain’s emphasis on cultural complicity between fidelity in translation and in marriage finds support from feminist translation scholars such as Susan Bassnett, Barbara Johnsohn, Barbara Godard, Sherry Simon and others (Das 2005: 144). However, the expression ‘Belles Infidèles’ does not belong to translation science as no scientific definition of the notion of ‘faithfulness’ has ever been found.

Bible translation (zampieri) as the term itself suggests, it consists in the translation of the Bible, the holy book of Judaism and Christianity, which is divided into the Old Testament (39 books constituting the sacred scriptures of Judaism and written mainly in Hebrew with a few portions in Aramaic), the New Testament (27 books originally written in Greek between 50 and 100 AD) and the Apocrypha (12 books also known as “deuterocanonical”, accepted only by Roman Catholics and rejected by Protestants as a basis for doctrines). Bible translation has a very long history which can be divided into three main periods: the Greco-Roman period (200 BC to 700 AD), the Reformation (16^th and 17^th centuries) and the Modern period (19^th and 20^th centuries, also called “the missionary centuries”). The very first translation of the Bible, from Hebrew into Greek, is the Septuagint, which was made between the 3^rd and the 1^st Century BC to meet the needs of the large Greek-speaking Jewish community in Alexandria. The Greco-Roman period witnessed the appearance of some of the first translations of the New Testament books into Latin, as well as many Old and New Testament translations into other languages of the Middle East such as Syriac, Coptic, Armenian, Georgian, Ethiopic, Arabic, Persian and Gothic. Although the ancient Greco-Roman world was well acquainted with translation, and the Greek classics were rendered with great skill and insight, scholars had the tendency to make literal Bible translations in order to completely preserve “God’s Word”, as they stated. The results, however, were sometimes lamentable. When in 384 AD Jerome was asked by Pope Damasus to revise the New Testament and later to translate the Hebrew Bible and the major deuterocanonical books into Latin, he adopted a new approach which consisted in privileging the content over the form. He followed, proclaimed and defended the well-conceived principles of rendering sense for sense and not word for word. Jerome was accused of altering the ancient books, but since then, his method has had a huge influence on translation theory; moreover, his Latin translation of the Bible, known as the “Vulgate”, has been serving as prototext for Western Christian translations for several centuries. During the Reformation, Bible translations were adapted to popular languages, to the detriment of the traditional rhetorical principles inherited from the Middle Ages. In this period a lot of translations into several major Western European languages such as Dutch, German, Czech, English and French were made. A dominant figure in the 16^th Century was of course Martin Luther, who translated the Bible into German in 1534, adopting some principles aiming at ready intelligibility. Luther defended his principles stating that they allowed the people to really understand the meaning of the Holy Scriptures. His same principles were followed by William Tyndale who first translated the New Testament into modern English, to become the primary basis for the later development of the King James Version, known as the “Authorized version”. To English-speaking Protestants, this version became the basis for interpretation and for any further translation. The first phase of the Modern period witnessed the production of revisions and new translations into many European languages because of the new discoveries and insights coming from archaeology and the study of Bible manuscripts. The two main works in English were The New American Bible (1970) and The New English Bible (1970). In the second phase translations for the “missionary world” were made: into Chinese, a number of Indian languages, Urdu, Persian and Arabic. Moreover, missionaries charged by special societies (the most famous are the American Bible Society and the Summer Institute of Linguistics) made hundreds of translations into many more languages. Nowadays the Bible is still the most translated book in the world and according to Eugene Nida “of all the various types of translating […] none surpasses Bible translating in: 1) the range of subject matter (e.g. poetry, law, proverbs, narration, exposition, conversation); 2) linguistic variety (directly or indirectly from Greek and Hebrew into more than 1,200 other languages and dialects); 3) historical depth (from the 3^rd Century BC to the present); 4) cultural diversity; 5) volume of manuscript evidence; 6) number of translators involved; 7) accumulation of data on principles and procedures employed; and 8) conflicting viewpoints”?(Nida 1964:4). As for the last point, Nida focuses his attention on the differences of opinion which have arisen, throughout the centuries, over the theological issues of 1) inspiration versus. philology, 2) tradition versus. contemporary authority, and 3) theology versus. grammar. The first opposition is embodied by Augustine and Jerome respectively. Augustine accepted the tradition of Aristeas concerning the alleged miraculous translation of the Septuagint by seventy-two men who, in groups of two and in complete isolation, translated the Old Testament with such divine inspiration that they produced thirty-six identical translations. Augustine, however, remarked that the Greek text of the Septuagint didn’t always agree with the Hebrew text and his explanation was that the Holy Spirit “could say through the translators something different from what he had said through the original prophets” (Nida 1964:26). Jerome, instead, rejected the idea of divine inspiration of translators and was in favor of a philological approach to translation. Jerome’s attitude was shared by Erasmus at the time of Reformation, and by most present-day scholars. Nowadays, the neo-orthodox theology has given a new perspective to the doctrine of divine inspiration, conceiving inspiration primarily in terms of the response of the receptor and giving less emphasis on what happened at the time of writing. The following simple statement sums up this new view “The Scriptures are inspired because they inspire me” (Nida 1964:27). So, the attention is focused on the means by which a message can be effectively communicated to present-day readers. People supporting the traditional, orthodox view of inspiration tend to favor literal renderings to preserve the inspiration of the writer by the Holy Spirit; while people holding the new-orthodox view tend to favor freer translations because they believe that “since the original document inspired its readers because it spoke meaningfully to them, only an equally meaningful translation can have this same power to inspire present-day receptors” (Nida 1965:27). The problems of traditional versus contemporary authority have affected translations more in the realm of interpretation and text than in style. Jerome was the first one who rejected traditional authority and adopted innovative principles both in the revision of the New Testament and in the translation of the Old Testament. But the irony of his work was that his Vulgate came to be venerated by traditionalists and it became the standard text of the Roman Catholic Church, even supplanting the Greek text itself. During the Reformation, Erasmus defended the Greek text of the New Testament against the Roman Church’s insistence on the Vulgate. Luther confronted the problem of traditionalism: he didn’t hesitate to reject the tradition when he remarked translation mistakes. For example in Luke 1:28 he noticed that the Vulgate rendering of plena gratiae “full of grace” was an inaccurate translation of the Greek participle kecharitoméne that means “highly favored”. Therefore he rejected the earlier German rendering of “voll Gnaden” (based on the Vulgate) and used “holdselige”, a very close parallel to the Greek. Also the translation of the Bible into Spanish by Eloin Nacar F. and Alberto Colunga in 1944 shows a number of significant departures from tradition, but retains certain Roman Catholic hallmarks, such as this “llena de gracia”. Even the excellent Bible de Jérusalem, despite being an outstanding piece of work adheres to the Vulgate tradition as it shows by the rendering “pleine de grâce”, but, at least, the true meaning of the Greek kecharitoméne is explained in a footnote. Another inaccurate translation of this kind, which appeared in the Vulgate and has remained in the tradition, is the translation of the Greek word almah (in Isaiah 7:14) as “virgin” rather than “young woman”, while in Matthew 6:13 most translations end the Lord’s Prayer with the phrase “deliver us from evil”, when the Greek text refers to “the Evil One” who is the Devil. In many cases the weight of tradition not only limits the translator’s creativity but also obstruct the reader’s comprehension. For example, most English-speakers have no idea of the real meaning of the verse «Hallowed be thy name» (Matthew 6:9). According to Nida a more comprehensible rendering would be “'May all people realize that you are God' or 'Help us to honour you as God' or even 'Help us to honour your name'” (Nida in Mona Baker 1998:26). The issue of theology versus grammar is a more subtle problem. Luther, for example, looked to grammar as a basis for interpretation. In particular he was strongly adherent to the principle of the receptor language grammar because in translation he had two main concerns: 1) that the people might fully understand the language and 2) that the theological implications of the Bible should be perfectly clear. With these aims in mind, in Roman 3:28 for instance, he translated “dass der Mensh gerecht werde ohne des Gesetzes Werke, allein durch den Glauben” adding the word “allein” that makes the last phrase mean “through faith alone”. He defended his choice by saying that the addition was justified by the theological significance of the passage and by the grammar structure of his own language. Modern translators, however, have been more inclined to trust the text as it is, rather than to re-enforce its meaning by adding words. Luther dealt also with the problem of meaningless ecclesiastical verbiage which he tried to eliminate as much as possible in the name of full intelligibility. The same problem is still faced by modern translators who, as Luther did, substitute obscure phrases with a more comprehensible language. As for the French language, the French-Israeli writer and politician André Chauraqui translated many religious texts from Hebrew in a revolutionary way, using a modern and clear language, near to the oral tradition of the Bible. His main translations are La Bible hébraïque et le Nouveau Testament in 26 volumes (1974-1977), L’Univers de la Bible (1982-1989), La Bible (1985-1989). The need to renovate the language is related to the fact that the contemporary significance of the Bible is not determined merely by what it meant to those who first received it, but by what it has come to mean to people throughout the intervening years.

Bibliographical references (Chiara Resmini): it is an alphabetical list of all the materials that you have consulted to write a text. In a reference list you have to include the name of the author, the title of the consulted book, newspaper, magazine, etc., the place of publication and the publisher if the source is a book, the date of publication, and the number of the page or pages from which you have taken the information. In writing the author’s data, you have to omit any title or degree, such as “The Honourable”, “Dr.”, etc.; the last name goes before the first and the middle names and it is separated from them by a comma (e.g. Schwab, Charles R.), and instead of writing the whole first and middle names, you can write only their initials. The title and subtitle of the book, magazine, etc. must be italicized, and the first word of the title, the first word of the subtitle, as well as the most important words except for articles, prepositions, and conjunctions must be capitalized. The place of publication is not the name of a country, state, province, or county, but the name of a city or town. If the name of the city or town is not well known or can create confusion (for example: “Paris, France” and “Paris, Texas”), you have to add the state, province or country. If the place of publication is not given, you have to write “n. p.”. For the date of publication, use the most recent Copyright year if two or more years are listed; for a daily or weekly publication, you have to indicate also date, month, and year (for example Newsweek 29 Sept. 2005); if the publication date is not given, use “n. d.”. Page numbers are not needed for a book, unless the citation comes from an article or an essay in an anthology; if there is not any number page given, use “n. p.”. Bibliographical references must be given in this order: if the source is a book, write Author. Title: Subtitle. City or Town: Publisher, Year of Publication.,whereas if the information have been taken from a magazine, journal, periodical, or newspaper article, write Author. "Title: Subtitle of Article." Title of Magazine, Journal, or Newspaper Day, Month, Year of Publication: Page Number(s).

Bilingual corpora, see Parallel corpora

Bi-text Michela Palmieri in translation, a bitext is a twofold paper including both the original and the translated versions of a text. Bitexts are generated by a “bitext tool”, a piece of software which aligns the two versions; bitext databases can be consulted by means of a search tool. Such I.T. instruments enable translators to easily identify the correspondence between terms of the two languages. The concept of bitext is similar to that of “translation memory”, but, whereas in translation memories terms, phrases and sentences are presented without reference to their original context, in bitexts you can find the whole translated version, sentence by sentence.

Blank spaces, see Voids

Blank verse translation

Borrowing (Zampieri)A borrowing is a word adopted by a speech community speaking a different language from the one it has originated in, as a consequence of the contact between different cultures. According to Vinay and Darbelnet, borrowings often enter a language after being introduced in a translation (Shuttleworth 1997: 17). Initially, they sound “foreign” to many speakers of the borrowing language, so they are at first considered as foreign words. When people become familiar with them and use them normally, despite they know little or nothing of the source language, this means that those words have become conventionalized. At this point they can be called “borrowings” or “loanwords”. Not all foreign words become borrowings, indeed if they fall out of use before they become widespread they do not reach the borrowing stage. Borrowings are normally of two kinds: borrowing of necessity, which are introduced in the borrowing language to fill a lexical and semantic gap, normally this is the case of realia, and luxury borrowings which are adopted by the borrowing language not to fill a gap but just because they add prestige to it. Some example are the English words “week-end”, “baby-sitter”, “manager” and “show” used in the Italian language. When borrowings are adopted, they normally adapt to the rules belonging to the system of the borrowing language; they can adapt to its phonology, orthography, morphosyntax and semantics. According to Nida “the borrowing of foreign-language words is often regarded as a safer practice than manufacturing terms with indigenous lexical components”, but when they become common in the borrowing culture “they are always subject to change in meaning, often with quite drastic reorientations. For example, Spanish rio 'river' is borrowed by Trique, a language of Mexico, with the meaning of 'boat' (Nida 1960:214). Each culture has a particular attitude towards borrowings. “In some societies it is taken for granted that one will usually borrow foreign words for new things as in English” (Nida 1964:173). The English language, in fact, has always adopted foreign words from the languages of the cultures it has come in contact with and the spread of borrowings has never been limited thanks to the absence of a national academy in Britain, in the U.S., or in other English-speaking countries in charge of limiting them and preserving the language’s purity. Other societies, on the contrary, prefer to make up descriptive equivalents, based on their own models of words or phrase formation, as in German and in French. Nowadays the language that more than other has been influencing and is being adopted around the world is of course English.

Calque (or Loan translation) (Veronica Mari): it is a word or phrase borrowed from another language by literal, word-for-word or root-for-root translation. The expression comes from the Latin “calcare”, meaning to tread or press. This linguistic phenomenon, usually regarded as a way to enrich the TL vocabulary, has always been frequent in history: the Romans calqued freely from the Greek, forming qualitas and quantitas from poiótēs (suchness) andposótēs (muchness). In some cases a Greek term and its Latin calque have both entered English: apátheia and its calque indolentia provide English with both apathy and indolence. Such loan translations often sound awkward at first, but come to be accepted with use. Calques may consist of compounds, for example German Weltanschauungbecoming English world-view, but also of entire translated phrases, such as time flies from Latin Tempus fugit andthat goes without saying from French ça va sans dire. The English false friend is a calque from the French faux ami, as well as the expression to kill time from tuer le temps; the French grateciel is a calque from English skyscraper. There are also half-calques, where just a part of a composed expression in preserved. For example, the translation of the German Dritte Reich in Italian is Terzo Reich, in Russian tretij rejh and in English Third Reich.

Canon francesca levato transliteration of the Greek word kanōn which in turn derives from a Semitic word for “reed”. In classical usage the basic meaning of “reed” is then extended to that of straight rod or “bar”, meaning literally ‘a measuring tool’. Metaphorically, it can also mean “norm”, “ideal” or standard of excellence, as well as “table” or “list” (VanderKam, Flint 2005:155). A helpful source is the verse in Gal. 6:16 in the Greek translation “kai osoi tō kanoni toutō stoichēsousin eirēnē ep autous kai eleos kai epi ton israēl tou theou”, which says that Christians are to live following a single “kanōn”, that is a rule. In later Christianity it acquires two meanings: “a norm for the church” and “a list of sacred writings of the Old and New Testaments” (VanderKam, Flint 2005:155). It is thus used, to refer to those books of the Bible “recognised by the Church as genuine and divinely inspired and therefore ‘true’” (Milner 2005:197) different from the apocrypha, those books claimed by some to be inspired but rejected by the Church. In literary studies the definition of “canon” is extended, denoting a set of officially recognised books (Milner 2005:6); those works “said to be repository of universal, timeless values, necessary for a stable and unified culture” (Braendlin 1989:2). By analogy with the religious definition the literary canon as well can be seen as ‘authentic’ and ‘inspired’ in ways that other types of text are not. This distinction is by no means a statement of fact by any authority (whereas in Christianity the authority is the Church) but it is to be considered as a mere judgement of value. The canon is therefore arbitrary, not fixed and can assume different shapes over time and in different places (it is thus culture-specific). The admission of this concept to literary criticism and English literature remains unknown. As highlighted by Jusdanis, the Oxford English Dictionary didn’t include any entries approximating the modern meaning of “a catalogue of books” until 1972, when a supplement including the definition “those writings of a secular author accepted as authentic” was published. Jusdanis points out that the term was used even before its admission to the dictionary and provides two sources: the first is the Encyclopaedia Britannica of 1885 which refers to the “Platonic Canon”; the second is C.J. Sisson’s Shakespeare: Complete Works (1953) in which the heading “The canon and the texts” appears. According to Jusdanis, “the relatively late recognition of this particular meaning of the term by the OED suggests that, although it had been used as early as 1885, it was not considered worthy of recording” (Jusdanis 1991:172). The term can also have a broader meaning. In cultural studies not only does the definition include that list of books, those ‘classics’ representative of a specific culture, but also that group of artworks, painters, characters etc. “conventionally regarded as representing the highest achievements of the culture” (During 2005:197) and in so doing, articulating a chronological continuity “by means of which members of a community understand their common links” (Jusdanis 1991:47). This broader concept appears utterly important in translation studies as it helps to form what is commonly defined as “cultural implicity”.

CAT see Computer-aided translation

Cataphora (Irene Pozzi): “cataphora” is a term derived from the Greek word kataphérō, meaning “put forward”. In linguistics, it is used to describe an expression (often a pronoun) co-referring with another expression which follows it in the discourse. The relation between the two expressions is mutual: the earlier expression refers to or describes the forward one, while the following expression, in its turn, provides the information necessary for interpretation of the preceding one. An example of cataphoric pronoun is shown in the following sentence: “If you like them, there are some roses on the table”, where them is clearly referred to the roses. Cataphora is sometimes used to obtain a  rhetorical effect by creating suspense and providing descriptions:  “She is the silliest girl have ever known. She is always talking about clothes and guys. She is a real alien. She is my neighbour, Dorothy”.

Category shift valentina giovanelli A category is a specifically defined division in a system of classification. In linguistics, it is a specific grammatical defining property of a linguistic class or unit, such as number or gender in the noun, the pronoun and the adjective, and tense or voice in the verb (Vinay & Darbelnet 1958). In other words, a grammatical category is a set of syntactic features that (1) express meanings from the same conceptual domain, (2) occur in contrast to each other and (3) are typically expressed in the same fashion. An important aspect of translation problems is linked to the existence or the nonexistence of grammatical categories in one of the languages. “To walk in the park is pleasant” and “a walk in the park is pleasant” are very similar expressions. But according to Jakobson, the change of grammatical category – the use of a name instead of a verb – has many consequences in the expressive sphere. A frequent problem for the translator from English is the use of simple past: it is almost impossible to understand if the verb has a perfective or an imperfective value, if the action is finished and definite or repeated and unfinished. By the way, it is difficult to decide what tense to use in the target language. Moreover, the possibility of the English language to use a “not very well defined past” is an expressive tool that other languages don’t have; this characteristic allows English authors to leave ambiguous what the grammatical category doesn’t imply (Osimo 2004). Therefore, if some grammatical category is absent in a given language, its meaning may be translated by lexical means, such as the use of the numerals. But, by doing so, it is more difficult to remain faithful to the original when translating into a language provided with a certain grammatical category from a language devoid of such a category (Schulte & Biguenet 1992). For example, the preposition of the English sentence “I swam across the river” cannot be translated in French word-by-word. In order to express the same meaning, the French sentence must be reformulated; the English preposition becomes a verb (traverser), and the English verb an expression (à la nage): “J’ai traversé la rivière à la nage” (Vinay & Darbelnet 1958). Grammatical patterns determine the aspects of each experience that has to be expressed in a certain language. If the required information of a grammatical pattern in a language is different from the required information in another language, the initial content of a message can be completely deprived. Furthermore, languages differ in what they must convey, since native listeners and speakers will focus on items belonging to their verbal code.

Channel (communication channel) (Cusi): in communication, it refers to the medium used to conveyinformation from a sender (or transmitter) to a receiver. There are at least two different models of communication: Claude Shannon and Warren Weaver’s mathematical model, in which communication is “the act of transferring information-carrying signals from a source to a receiver”. That involves breaking down an information system into sub-systems to evaluate the efficiency of various communication channels and codes. Roman Jakobson’s semiotic model in which interpersonal verbal communication moves beyond the basic transmission model of communication and highlights the importance of the codes and social contexts involved. Shannon-Weaver’s model (1947) proposes that all communication must include six elements: a source, an encoder, a channel, a decoder and a receiver. Other elements are a message, a signal and noise. This model was produced in the field of information theory and it was initially technology-oriented. For example, in a phone call the speaker is the source, the one who is listening is the receiver. Encoder and decoder are those parts of the phone which transform sound waves into electric oscillations and vice versa. The discourse between these two people is the message, the telephone cable is the channel and the changes of tension are the signal. The noise derives from disturbances on the line. Jakobson studied the constitutive factors of any speech event, in any act of verbal communication. In his model “the addresser sends a message to the addressee. To be operative the message requires a context referred to understandable by the addressee; a code fully, or at least partially, common to the addresser and the addressee and finally a contact, a physical channel and psychological connection between the addresser and the addressee” (Jakobson 1987:66). The words “channel” and “medium” are often used interchangeably. The choice of the appropriate channel is important in communication. In fact we won’t use a visual channel to communicate with a blind or an auditory channel with a deaf.

Chronotope Michela Palmieri it is a word of Greek origin which literally means “time-space”. In text (and translation) analysis, chronotopes are the cultural coordinates of a text, which help establish the time and location of a story, the psychological side of characters, and the world invented by the author. As a matter of fact, there are three levels of chronotopes: topographic chronotope (which indicates time and space of a plot), psychological chronotope (indicating the inner world of characters), and metaphysical chronotope (which refers to the author’s conception) (Osimo 2004:111). According to Torop (1995:149), the topographic chronotope analysis can also help understand the time and space strategy chosen by the narrator to turn their story into a plot; as regards the metaphysical chronotope, Torop (1995:149) claims that translators must identify the stylistic features used by the author to express their own conception of the narrated world, the author’s mental world. According to the Russian philologist Bakhtin (1981:400) each character of a plot has a unique idiolect and psychology and can therefore be considered as a real person; that is why the relationships between characters and between the author and their characters can be compared to those between existing human beings. This element must be taken into consideration by translators when analyzing the psychological chronotope. The problems of translatability of a given author mainly depend on the difficulty to recognize their lexical and syntactical choices on the bases of the above mentioned chronotopes (Osimo 2004:113).

Class shift alessandra porchera According to Catford, shifts are “departures from formal correspondence in the process of going from the SL (source language) to the TL (target language)”. He also indentified different types of shifts, among which the major ones are level shifts and category shifts. Class shifts may belong to category shifts and can occur when an item in the sending culture is translated with an item in the receiving culture which belongs to a different grammatical class. As class depends on structure, structure-shifts usually imply class-shifts. Taking into account the example “a white house = une maison blanche”, the translation equivalent of the English adjective “white” is the French adjective “blanche”. Even if in this case “white” and “blanche” are exponents of the formally corresponding adjective class and there is not apparently any class shift, analyzing them more deeply it is possible to recognize two subclasses of adjectives: those acting as modifiers and those acting as qualifiers in the noun group structure. (Qualifiers adjectives are numerous in French and very rare in English.) As in English “white” is a modifier adjective while in French “blanche” is a qualifier adjective the shift from the modifier to the qualifier function entails a class-shift. However there are more obvious examples of class shifts, too: e.g. in the following case the noun group “a medical student” is translated in French with the expression un étudiant en médecine. Here the translation equivalent of the adjective “medical”, which acts as modifier, is the adverbial phrase en médecine, which acts as qualifier; and the lexical equivalent of the adjective medical is the noun médecine (Catford, 1965).

Close translation (resmini): term that is used by some writers to indicate translation strategies encouraging exact correspondence between the linguistic units of the source language and those of the target language. Therefore, the aim of the close translation is not to convey the overall meaning of the prototext.

Closed text: in Eco (1979), a text characterized by a single possible interpretation foreseen by the author. A typical example of "closed text" is a booklet containing the directions to use household appliances. Closed  texts have a single dominant; whenever the reader uses a different dominant to decode it, the result is an aberrant decoding.

Code (Lûdskanov) Porchera

Coding (Lûdskanov) process consisting in the representation of some information through the set of means available in a specific language. If the language is a verbal one, then coding coincides with verbalization. ‘Coding’ is a stage of the translation process following decoding and mental working through (in translation, ‘coding’ is also called “recoding”.).

Coherence (Miraglia): it is not easy to define what it is, especially without referring to the concept of cohesion. According to Shoshana Blum-Kulka, coherence can be viewed as "a covert potential meaning relationship among parts of a text, made overt by the reader or listener through processes of interpretation," while cohesion can be considered as "an overt relationship holding between parts of the text, expressed by language specific markers." Gardes Tamine (1992:48) agrees with her by declaring that the difference between coherence and cohesion is that the former is based on semantic and logic relationships, while the latter implies only morpho-syntactic and lexical relationships. The translation process unavoidably implies shifts in cohesion and coherence, especially if it is considered as an act of communication, where the process and the product of the communicative act necessarily relate to at least the linguistic, discoursal and social systems holding for the two languages and cultures involved. Blum-Kulka makes a distinction between reader-focused and text-focused shifts in coherence. As far as the first category is concerned, according to Fillmore (1981), a sort of envisionment of the text occurs in the reader’s mind during the reading process; this envisionment, of course, can vary with individual readers and with different types of audiences. When it comes to translation, these shifts are essentially unavoidable, as different cultural backgrounds and reference networks are involved. Text-based shifts in coherence, instead, often occur as a result of particular choices made by a specific translator, who failed to realize the functions of a particular linguistic system, or a particular form plays in conveying indirect meanings in a given text, thus affecting the text’s meaning potential. As to shifts in cohesion, shifts in types of cohesive markers in translation can basically produce in the metatext shifts in levels of explicitness and shifts in text meaning. But, as stated before, coherence is not a well-defined concept, as there are many opinions from different important scholars. Let us mention some of them: Van Dijk interprets coherence from the perspective of semantics. He believes that "coherence is a semantic property of discourse, based on the interpretation of each individual sentence relative to the interpretation of other sentences "(1973). Halliday's full attention is given to those cohesive devices such as reference, substitution, ellipsis, conjunction and lexical cohesion. Widdowson (1978) believes it is a pragmatic concept and sees it as the relationship between illocutionary acts. According to Beaugrande (1981), coherence is represented by the procedures which ensure conceptual connectivity, including (1) logical relations, (2) organization of events, objects and situations, (3) continuity in human experience. It concerns "the way in which the components of the textual world which underlie the surface text are mutually accessible and relevant" (1981:4). In Brown and Yule's opinion (1983), it is the result of the interaction of the text and the receiver, provided by readers' processing of the text. But, once seen the unhomogeneous definitions given, one could dare say that maybe it would be better considering coherence, from a broader point of view, as an essential property of texts involving at the same time the syntactic, semantic, pragmatic and stylistic level . As Neubert said: “Text-based translation is to establish in the target text a coherence functionally parallel to that of the source text" (Neubert 1992:93). “The maintenance of coherence should be established as a criterion for adequate translation"  (Neubert 1992:99).

Collective translation marilena zardoni

Collocation (Silvia Romano): it is the relationship existing between two words or groups of words that usually go together and form a common expression. If the expression is heard often, then the words become “glued” together in our minds. Collocation refers to the restrictions on how words can be used together, for example which verbs and nouns are used together or which prepositions are used with particular verbs. The patterns of word usage that native speakers all know are subtle and can be difficult to explain: in English when we need to describe a good-looking man and a good-looking woman we talk of a beautiful woman and of a handsome man, but we seldom hear a beautiful man or a handsome woman. It is possible to describe a woman as handsome but this implies that she is not beautiful in the traditional sense of female beauty, rather that she is mature in age, and has a certain strength of character. Similarly, a man could be described as beautiful, but this would usually imply that he has feminine features. Another example can be offered by the use of the adjective “high” which collocates with “probability”, but not with “chance”: a “high probability” but a “good chance”. We must keep in mind that we cannot substitute a word in a collocation with a related word, therefore we say “white wine” but we don’t say “yellow wine” although both yellow and white are names of colors (non-substitutability). Sometimes for a learner it can be difficult to understand the meaning of a collocation since it is not a straightforward sum of the meanings of its parts (as in the case of idioms like “kick the bucket” that means “to die”). We cannot modify a collocation or apply syntactic transformations, and say, using the example above: “the bucket was kicked”, because it would have nothing to do with dying (non-modifiability). The problem for the learner is that there are no collocation rules that can be learned. The native speaker is intuitively able to make the correct collocation, based on a lifetime’s experience of hearing and reading the words in set combinations. The non-native speaker has a more limited experience and may collocate words in a way that sounds odd to the native speaker even if somehow understandable.

Commission

Communication load (or Information load)

Communicative approach: it is used by Shuttleworth (1997) as synonym of communicative translation

Communicative dimension in the translation process

Communicative position

Communicative situation alessandra porchera “A communicative situation can be identified by its recurrent patterns in a society, in terms of participants, setting, communicative functions, and so on. Over time this communicative situation tend to identify makers of language structure and use, more or less formatted, different from the language of others communicative situation” (Ferguson 1985). As Ferguson and Huebner (1996) say, register depends on the situation in which language is used. According to Jakobson the communicative situation is a situation that involves an addresser and an addressee. “The communication occurs within a particular context and a particular code or a variety common to the addresser and the addressee” (Jakobson, 1960). The communication will also involve a message and a contact: “a physical channel and a psychological connection between the addresser and the addressee enabling both of them to stay into communication” (Jakobson 1960). Sometimes communication is more concerned with establishing and maintaining social roles than transferring information. It is possible to identify six functions of language: the referential function, the poetic function, the emotive function, the conative function, the phatic function and the metalingual function. The referential function is linked to the context, and its main purpose is to give information about the world. Language which expresses the attitude of the addresser has an emotive function. It expresses the speakers’ attitude towards what they are speaking about. The conative function of language is oriented towards the addressee and is expressed, for example, by commands. “It finds its purest grammatical expression in the vocative and imperative, which syntactically, morphologically and often even phonemically deviate from the nominal to the verbal categories” (Jakobson 1960). Language that primarily aims at establishing or prolonging the communication, catching the attention of the interlocutor or confirming his continued attention, has a phatic function, while language which clarifies and refers to language itself has a metalingual function. “Imagine such an exasperating dialogue: 'The sophomore was plucked.' 'But what is plucked?' 'Plucked means the same as flunked.' 'And flunked?' 'To be flunked is to fail an exam.' 'and what is sophomore?' persists the interrogator innocent of school vocabulary. 'A sophomore is (or means) a second-year student’. All these equational sentences convey information about the lexical code of English” (Jakobson 1960). According to Jakobson the poetic function is oriented to the message for its own sake. “The poetic function projects the principle of equivalence from the axis of selection into the axis of combination. Equivalence is promoted to the constitutive device of the sequence” (Jakobson 1960). Even if every communication has a dominant function, other less primary functions can be identified (Corbett 1997:24).

Communicative subject of translation

Communicative translation: Newmark (1981) uses this term to define a strategy of translation attempting "to produce on its readers an effect as close as possible to that obtained on the readers of the original". According to Shuttleworth (1997) this means that such a translation is generally oriented towards the need of the target language reader so that "the emphasis should be on conveying the message of the original in a form which conforms to the linguistic, cultural and pragmatic conventions of the target language rather than mirroring the actual words of the source text as closely as possible without infringing the target language norms". This allows the translator to interpret the source text with more freedom, to smooth over irregularities of style, remove ambiguities and even correct the author's factual errors. As a result, the semantic potential of the source text is limited by trying to produce a metatext fulfilling one specific communicative function which is determined by the type of target language reader. (See also Model of reader; Implicit translation).

Commutation, see Textual Equivalence

Comparable corpora: (Cristina Pigozzi) a comparable corpus is a collection of texts in their original language together with texts translated into the same language, from one or more source languages (Winters, 2007). Since they include texts written in their original language and translated texts, comparable corpora are extremely useful in order to recognize “specific, identifiable features that may be related to the nature of the translation activity itself” (Olohan 2004:90), beyond basic differences between languages.

Comparative studies alice The comparative method consists in comparing elements or phenomena which are chronologically, geographically and/or culturally different. Comparative studies comprehend a series of disciplines, such as thematology (the study of themes in literature), imagology (an inclusive critical compendium on national characterizations and national, cultural or ethnic stereotypes), the study of literary genres, and translation theory, which “originated and developed in the traditional comparative studies as an empiric method of textual comparison” (Popovič 1975), but then became more specific. “Comparative studies are too universal and generic […]; they don’t have a specific analytic structure. In order to achieve their objectives, comparative studies have to appeal to comparative stylistics, comparative metrics, translation theory, etc” (Hvišč 1972). According to Popovič, comparative studies are a generalising discipline and single specific disciplines make use of its summarizing observations. This kind of studies can focus both on intersemiotic or intrasemiotic relations. The former refer to different systems of signs: i.e. comparisons between written texts and songs, artworks, films, etc., the latter can take into consideration interlinguistic/intralinguistic relations and intertextual/intratextual relations. As for interlinguistic relations, comparative studies deal with translation and the literature of two or more different linguistic, cultural or national groups (comparative literature). It may also be performed on works in the same language that are spoken in different nations or cultures. When comparing texts in the same language, the studies can focus on texts taking into consideration their genre, the chronotopic aspect, their style, etc, or they can analyze a single text and its linguistic and stylistic features.

Comparison of communicative positions in the metatext

Compensation (Simona Rolleri): compensation is a translation technique which involves making up for the loss of a prototext effect by recreating a similar one elsewhere in the metatext through linguistic devices which are specific to the receiving language, culture and/or text.

Competence

Compilative translation

Complementary reference

Componential analysis, see Analysis

Computer Aided Translation (Zampieri) CAT (Computer-aided Translation or MAT Machine-aided Translation, also called Machine Aided Human Translation, or Machine-assisted Human Translation or Machine-assisted Translation): is a broad term which refers to “a translation strategy whereby translators use computer programs to perform part of the process of translation” (Sager 1994 in Shuttelworth 1997:98). At times CAT is confused with MT or machine translation but the two concepts are not similar. While MT is intended as a fully automatic translation system with very limited human intervention, in CAT the computer program supports the translator accelerating the process. However, it is difficult to separate clearly this two modes of operation because there is a considerable area of overlap. Nowadays there are many types of computer applications commonly used by professional translators, ranging from the simple to the more complicated ones. Among them we find word processing, CD-ROM resources (monolingual or bilingual dictionaries), optical character recognition, concondancers which retrieve instances of a word or an expression and their respective meaning in a monolingual, bilingual or multilingual language, e-mail, bitexts, corpora or pre-existing or pre-translated text segments, indexers, on-line dictionaries (with or without an automatic look-up facility), many tools designed to help develop and store term banks of previously translated words and phrases and so on. This last is especially important when there is a team of translators working together on different parts of the same project or when a project is on-going. CAT programs can also be used to create glossaries of frequently used terms enabling the translators to work more efficiently. The efficiency of CAT varies according to the type of text we want to translate. It gives more satisfactory results if used to translate texts belonging to a specialist area, characterised by consistency of terminology (the same term is used in the same sense), by phraseological consistency (the same idea and the same action are described in an identical manner always) and when the text is made up of simple and short phrases so that the probability of repetition increases and the cases of ambiguity are reduced. The most famous modern CAT programs are Trados, Déjà Vu, TransSuite, Transit and SDLX whose main attraction is translation memory which suggest translations for words and phrases in the source text automatically.

Comunicazione (Lûdskanov) Cristina Cusi

Comunicazione comportamentale (Lûdskanov)Cristina Cusi

Comunicazione intelligibile (Lûdskanov)Cristina Cusi

Conative 

Conative, function (Irene Pozzi)

Concordance

Conflictual metatext (Valeria Crea) : metatext reproducing the prototext in a critical and negative way, i.e., the attitude of the metatext towards the prototext is polemical or controversial. This polemic attitude may consist of an extreme denial of the thematic and expressional qualities of the prototext, the so-called 'destruction' of the text. According to James S. Holmes, a metatext approaches the prototext as the prototext approaches reality (Popovič 2007:137). If authors have the possibility to polemicize with reality, translators can polemicize only with the author by exaggerating the characteristics of the prototext they don’t agree with (Popovič 2007:42). This is the case of Przyboš’ translations of the Russian poet Majakovskij. The Polish poet and translator hyperbolizes Majakovskij’s expressive elements, polemicizing with his pathetic style. This kind of approach is the result of the typification of the prototext made by the author (Popovič 2007:130). Some examples of conflictual metatexts are those translations in which the deconstructive element is predominant, such as parodies, literary debates, editio purificata, travesti etc.: in these cases, there’s not a mechanical continuity of texts, but a kind of stylization tending at modeling the general qualities of the prototext in the metatext.  However, translators should have a positive relationship with the prototext, otherwise they would risk to go beyond their status of translators and against the peculiarity of translation. 

Connotation: (Francesca Magnaghi) it is the additional sense or senses associated with or suggested by a word or phrase. Connotations are sometimes fixed, and often subjective. Connotation involves the semantic structure of both individual words and texts. It, therefore, deals with complex semantic relationships working at the level of microsemantics, and it is, for this reason, strongly related to literature and the language of poetry in particular. Connotation in words, expressions and texts expounds both the expressive and the emotive aspects of language and as such it seems that all connotative words and expressions verge on the vague and stand midway between symbolism and ambiguity. By virtue of its suggestive power as an emotive and expressive vehicle, it offers one of the most effective parameters according to which both the literary competence of the writer and the cultural awareness of the reader are revealed and gauged. Metaphor is a kind of connotation implying a resemblance between one object and another. The main purpose of metaphor is to describe an object more comprehensively and concisely than is possible by using literal language. Good writers use metaphors to help the reader to gain a more accurate - both physical and emotional - insight  into a character or a situation. They use metaphor to produce images in their descriptions or narrations to make them more colorful, dramatic and witty. Since metaphor is an active and lively component of a language, in the course of translation due attention must be given to the analysis of the connotative sense of a metaphor. Just as Peter Newmark pointed out, “metaphor is at the center of all problems of translationtheory” (1981: 76); the translation of metaphor is an important topic for translators and the most difficult one. Different nations have different cultures, but there are connections between different cultures, which make intercultural communication and translation possible. There are similarities and dissimilarities in the connotation of metaphors across languages. Differences in tradition, history, religion, life, sports, etc. are all reflected in metaphorical phrases. People share aspects of experience in their daily life, that's why some metaphors in different culture may have the same object or image. “In translation of metaphor, the more universal the sense, the more likely the transfer” (Newmark, 1981: 88). Literally translating a metaphor means using the same image, thus conveying the original cultural connotation and letting the reader learn some aspects of the source culture.Translation is an inter-language interaction and also a kind of cultural transplant, so a translator is a means to spread cultures. Although there is cultural overlap between different languages, in most cases images and senses do not match. So a translator should strive to find a way to compensate the meaning of the metaphor in the target language. Translating a metaphor by a simile or converting a metaphor to sense are ways to compensate for the semantic loss. Translation involves language as well as culture. Translators should know foreign cultures as well astheir own. In the translation of metaphors, a translator should make continuous comparisons between the two cultures in order to convey similar meanings and feelings. Since there are many differences between the transmitting and the receiving cultures, translators should try their best to remove communication barriers.

Constitutive translational conventions

Content-derivative form (or Organic form)

Content-focused texts, see Informative texts

Context Michela Palmieri it is the cultural background of a speech or publication, including knowledge which is shared by the speaker/writer and the addressee and which is essential for the text to be understood. According to Catford, there is a difference between cultural context and lexical context, the former being the “‘context of situation’, i.e. those elements of the extra-textual situation which are related to the text as being linguistically relevant” (1965:31). The lexical context is instead composed of “items in the text which accompany the item under discussion” (Catford 1965:30-31), which Catford calls “co-text”. Situational context is one of the main reasons why automated translation is not a valid alternative, particularly if the text to translate is not technical: since context is an essential element for the comprehension of texts, an effective translation cannot be achieved with the use of computers only.

Contextual consistency (palmieri): When a word occurs more than once within a source text, the translator can choose to translate it with different words in the target text according to the context where it appears. When this happens, the translator chooses a policy of contextual consistency, which is opposed to verbal consistency, a practice that consists in using always the same target-language word. Nida and Taber (1969: 12) argue that contextual consistency should be given priority over verbal consistency in translation, as “each language covers all of experience with a set of verbal symbols [...] and each language is different from all other languages in the ways in which the sets of verbal symbols classify the various elements of experience.”

Contrast

Controlled language it is a variant of a natural language. Terminology, syntax and/or semantics of a controlled language are constrained. The grammar of a controlled language is more restricted than the one of the natural language and the vocabulary is less extensive than in the natural language. A fundamental principle of controlled language is the elimination of ambiguity (Fawcett, Wirth 2005). Each word should only have one meaning and synonyms are to be avoided. A word may also belong to one grammatical category only. For example the word “start” may be used only as a noun and not as a verb (Altwarg 2007). Consequently, for each word there is only one possible translatant. However, the amount of constraints differ significantly between one controlled language and the other. Constraints of controlled languages can concern different levels: a) the lexical level (functional words, modal verbs, participal forms, acronyms and abbreviations, orthography). For example the acronym “OF” for “oil field” is problematic since it is spelled identically as the preposition “of” (Mitamura 1999); b) The phrase level (phrasal verbs, coordination of verb phrases, conjoined prepositional phrases) For example the ambiguity in the phrase “piece of glass and metal“ that could mean piece of [glass and metal] but also [piece of glass] and [metal] (Mitamura 1999); c) The sentence level (coordinate conjunction of sentences, relative clauses and adjoined elliptical modifiers). For example relative clauses should always be introduced by the relative pronouns, “that” or “which” (Mitamura 1999). Another constraint may be not to use pronouns. Instead of writing like in natural language: “The button expands into a window when you click it” respecting the constraint of not using pronouns the sentence would have to be: “The button expands into a window when you click the button” (Muegge 2007:23). When creating controlled language, linguists may encounter the problem of maintaining expressiveness. Mitamura (1999) states that “In systems where the vocabulary is extremely limited, the authors may need to write long, convoluted sentences to express complicated meanings”. Authors who write in controlled language have less creative freedom. Learning to write in controlled language requires particular training (Muegg 2007). The original purposes of controlled language were to improve text comprehensibility and facilitating language learning, especially with regard to technical texts. The best-known controlled language is in fact the ASD Simplified Technical English. Texts that are often written in controlled language are user and maintainence manuals. Fawcett and Wirth (2005) claim that, despite the particular characteristics of controlled language, readers normally do not notice that a text is written in controlled language. Today the use of controlled language mainly aims at reducing costs, in particular costs for translation. According to Schmidt (2007: 31), a text written in controlled language requires less time to be translated and thereby costs can be reduced. Another area of application is machine translation. Texts written in controlled language, because of their lack of ambiguity, are easier to be processed by machine translation systems (Muegge 2007:23). A text written in controlled language and translated by a machine translation system may be post edited within short time by a translator. Muegge (2007:23) maintains that controlled language increases the quality of machine translation. According to tests he conducted, the translation of a text written in controlled language, translated by a machine translation system and post edited by a translator, requires considerably less time than the translation of the same text written in natural language and translated without the use of machine translation. Many controlled languages have been developed for international companies and organizations “in order to restrict the complexity of the language used in their documentation and thus optimise the document production and the reception processes” (Rascu 2006). An important tool for authors who write in controlled language are software programs called “Controlled Language Checker”. These tools automatically check whether the author of a text is respecting the constraints of the controlled language and some tools also suggest options for rewriting.

Conventions (Silvia Romano) It is a practice recognized, consciously or unconsciously, as valid, and similarly to a habit it generates expectation that it will be continued. It is everywhere we look in literature, and it is fundamental in the act of translation. Convention explains why, when we read the translation of the Iliad, we accept that Hector, the Trojan hero, speaks English, Italian or any other language. But there are all sort of conventions in translation. For instance, a text can be translated into the “literary conventions” of the age of the translator, or of the culture of the source text or of the target text. There are also conventions that a translator might borrow from other translators without being aware of doing it; for example the assumption that the only proper way to translate a choral ode from Greek tragedy is “free verse”. But it is not just the culture of the translator that has conventions, the culture of the author of the source text does too. According to William Arrowsmith there are cases in which the conventions become so numerous that the best way to deal with the translation is to abandon the effort to render the smallest verbal units of the source text, and concentrate on translating its conventions into analogous even if different ones. A translator must keep in mind that conventions expect a certain strangeness: a reader could not accept a character of a play of Euripides to bear an English name or to use euros.

Copyright (Cristina Cusi): is the legal provision of exclusive rights to reproduce and distribute literary, dramatic, musical, artistic, and other intellectual works. This protection is available to both published and unpublished works. The 1976 Copyright Act gives the copyright owner the exclusive right to authorize others to reproduce the work in copies or phonorecords (cassette tapes, CDs, LPs, 45 r.p.m. disks, as well as other formats); to prepare derivative works based upon the work; to distribute copies or phonorecords of the work to the public by sale or other transfer of ownership, or by rental, lease, or lending; to perform the work publicly, in the case of literary, musical, dramatic, and choreographic works, pantomimes, motion pictures and other audiovisual works; to display the work publicly, in the case of literary, musical, dramatic, and choreographic works, pantomimes, and pictorial, graphic, or sculptural works, including the individual images of a motion picture or other audiovisual work; and in the case of sound recordings, to perform the work publicly by means of a digital audio transmission. These rights, however, are not unlimited in scope. One of the main limitations is the doctrine of “fair use”. In other instances, the limitation takes the form of a “compulsory license” under which some limited uses of copyrighted works are permitted upon payment of specified royalties and compliance with statutory conditions. Law defines "sound recordings" as “works that result from the fixation of a series of musical, spoken, or other sounds, but not including the sounds accompanying a motion picture or other audiovisual work.” Common examples are recordings of music, drama, or lectures. A sound recording is not the same as a phonorecord, but the physical object in which works of authorship are embodied. The same law applies to translations, too. Seventy years after the author's death, the copyright expires. Translation rights may be held either by the author or the publisher of the original work and are handled by the so-called 'literary' agencies. Each of them has a counterpart in every country. People wishing to propose the translation of a work have to contact a publisher, who will on their turn locate the agency handling the rights. As far as living authors - or authors who died less than seventy years ago - are concerned, in every single language only one publisher can acquire and hold the rights to publish a given translation.

Corpora (Pigozzi): Corpora is the plural of the Latin word ‘corpus’ meaning ‘body’. In reference to linguistics and translation science, a corpus is “a large collection of authentic texts that have been gathered in electronic form according to a specific set of criteria” (Bowker and Pearson, 2002:9). A corpus may contain texts in a single language (monolingual corpora) or text in two or more languages (bilingual or multilingual corpora). Another important distinction is the one between parallel corpora, that are collections of texts written in one language and their translation into another language, and comparable corpora, that are collections of texts in their original language together with texts translated into the same language, from one or more source languages. Depending on the varieties of language included in it, a text corpus can be defined as general or specialized, synchronic or diachronic, written- or spoken-language corpus. Moreover, in order to make corpora more useful for linguistic research, they are often subjected to a process known as “annotation”; an example of annotation is the part-of-speech tagging, in which part-of-speech information is added to the corpus in the form of tags (Winters: 2007). For translation theorists and researchers corpora are an extremely useful tool, since they give access to information about translation practices hardly available otherwise. By comparing texts in their original language and their translation in parallelcorpora, it is possible to identify differences and observe the mediation process carried out by the translator. This kind of analysis can be completed by comparing translated and untranslated texts in comparable corpora: in this way it is possible to recognize “specific, identifiable features that may be related to the nature of the translation activity itself” (Olohan 2004:90), beyond basic differences between languages. Through this comparison, researchers have noticed that translation follows typical patterns, such as explicitation, simplification, normalization and interference, and for this reason it is possible to consider it as a genre itself, the so-called ‘translationese’. For the purposes of professional translators working in technical fields, translation memories, a particular type of parallel corpora, are very helpful. A translation memory is a data bank from which translators automatically retrieve fragments of past translations that match a current segment to be translated. Since they provide a range of metatexts in a similar context, the use of translation memories is limited to specialized texts, while it is pointless in literary translation. However, corpora are helpful also for literary translators, because they provide a representative sample of language in use and they are “manipulable, in the sense that information such as a term’s frequency of use or collocational range can be extracted” (Taylor 1998:44). Even if searching for the meaning of a word in a corpus is a longer operation than looking it up in a dictionary, the result is much more precise, as it arises from direct interpretation based on the context. Moreover, all the collocations of a word can be called up and their frequency patterns can be analysed as related to the context and the variety of language used. Also the internet, being an immense text archive, can be considered a corpus: through a normal search engine it is possible to get an idea of the usage frequency of a word or a text string and to get confirmation of hypotheses. However, while corpora are usually created by experts who consciously select texts according to registers and origins, the internet is a ‘spontaneouscorpus’ and for this reason it risks to be less representative (Osimo 2004). Among the most important and wide English language corpora there are: the British National Corpus (BNC), the Cobuild Bank of English and the Brown Corpus of Standard American English.

Correctability

Correspondence

Co-text Michela Palmieri

Couple translation Simona rolleri according to Popovič, this kind of translation results from the cooperation between a linguist and a writer (or poet). The former decodes the prototext and provides a rough translation; the latter transforms it into the new metatext relying on his good writing skills, with the result that the two stages of the translation process (analysis and synthesis) are performed independently by two different people. The resulting translation is the combination of both their contributions. This kind of cooperation is very useful when the prototext originates in remote cultures and languages and few translators know them. Couple translations violate, however, the universal principle that the translator must have more than a basic knowledge of the source language in order to be able to extrapolate from the prototext the necessary information about its socio-cultural context and all the aesthetic values of the genre it belongs to. Rarely couple translations achieve this goal, and here is why most of the linguist-writer couples split up after the first cooperation. Collaborations last longer, however, in technical or scientific fields, where translators need an expert’s opinion on the subject. It should not be forgotten that, nowadays, translators tend to specialize in order to gain more and more independence (Popovič 2006:140-141).

Covert translation: According to Mark Shuttleworth (1997) this term, introduced by House (1977), refers to a mode of translation aiming to produce a target text (metatext) functionally equivalent to the source text (prototext) by concealing the translated nature of the target text. This strategy of translation is appropriate for those source texts "which are not inextricably associated with the language, traditions, history or other aspects of the source culture" (e.g. advertising, journalistic or technical texts). "The application of a 'cultural filter' is required in order to produce a cultural configuration in the target text which is equivalent to that found is source text". (see also implicit translation)

Creolization of culture: (Crea) “creolization” is a semiotic term describing the sociolinguistic process through which a language, such as pidgin, which is normally spoken in a simplified or altered form by non-natives, reworks and transforms its over-simplified grammatical structures and the cultural patterns of varied social and historical experiences and identities. As a syncretic and hybrid process of interculturation, creolization suggests an intermingling among cultures that results in a constant transformation into something new. In his analysis of translation as an intercultural semiotic phenomenon, Anton Popovič introduced the concept of "creolization of culture". According to the Slovak scholar, the cultural interaction exemplified by translations produces a form of "creolization", in which the metatext is a synthesis of the structure of both the prototext and the receiving culture. Given that the two cultures involved in the translation process undergo a reciprocal partial overlapping, every metatext is a combination (“creolization”) of two cultures. Such a view is in line with Lotman’s self/other dialectics: the source culture usually combines both the author’s personal culture and the collective culture. The receiving culture is instead the culture of the "outer world", the others’ world. Popovič then outlines three different possible interactions between cultures: 1) the metatext culture is stronger than the prototext culture. The former therefore exerts a centrifugal stress on the latter; 2) the prototext culture is stronger than the metatext culture. In this case, the former exerts a centrifugal stress on the latter; 3) the interaction between the two cultures is balanced. Since in a translation only one version is expressed, translators must choose one of the three strategies, each producing a different kind of loss. If the translator chooses the first solution, the reader comes across many elements of the prototext culture: in this case, the communication loss concerns the readability of the text (hampered by the preservation of typical structures of the source culture) and the comprehension of culture-specific elements such asrealia. If the translator chooses the second solution, the text is readable and fluent, but source culture-specific elements have been replaced by target culture-specific elements: in this case, the text has lost its cultural identity. If the translator chooses the third solution, the translation loss will consist of both culture-specific elements and linguistic and syntactical features. Toury (1995) criticizes Popovič’s concept of "creolization". Although he agrees that translations can be considered an independent system, he rejects the idea of the existence of an intermediate “land of nobody” between two cultures: a text is influenced above all by the receiving culture. He writes: "What is totally unthinkable is that a translation may hover in between cultures, so to speak: 'As long as a (hypothetical) interculture has not crystallized into an autonomous (target), systemic entity, e.g., in processes analogous to pidgination and creolization, it is necessarily part of an existing (target) system'"(1995: 28). He suggests that translators should identify the single elements to ascribe to the receiving or to the source culture.

Creolization of language laura bortoluzzi is a term that semiotics borrowed from linguistics. Creole languages can be considered as the result of a mixing process, having a double meaning. On the one side, mixing can be seen as the interference of two or more linguistic systems: a superstrate or target language (that of the European colonizers) and a substrate or source language (that of the colonized people, often an African-based language or dialect); and on the other, it can be seen as the reconstructing of the superstrate language, through a process of relexification which implies the usage of the grammar of the substrate language with the lexicon of the superstrate one (Chaudenson, 1999). In opposition to the classical theory of creolization as a nativization of a pidgin, Chaudenson (1999) stresses the importance of considering the phenomenon from a sociolinguistic perspective, taking into account the social and historical development of colonial societies. According to his interpretation, in the initial phase of colonization, creolization could be defined as a particular case of divergence from a language, involving “the emergence of a continuum of approximations of the target language in communicative situations in which a strong centripetal system is found”. It can also be seen, however, as “a radical linguistic mutation” that leads, through a strategy of language appropriation, to the emergence of an autonomous system. This whole process of mutual infuencing and intermingling can be well applied to translation considered as a “contact zone” (Hutnyk 2005), which can also be assumed as a model for linguistic and cultural innovation (Fabbri 2002). Following Popovič’s definition of translation as an example of “cultural interaction” (Osimo 2000-2004b), it can be seen as the result of the creolization of prototext and metatext, at both linguistic and cultural level (so much that we also speak of creolization of culture). At the linguistic level, creolization can be observed in accidental occurrences of the prototext language in that of the metatext, or in an unsystematic overlapping of their linguistic structures, through lexical, morphological and syntactic calques (Popovič 1975). Popovič insists on the notion of creolization because every actualization of a prototext (that is every metatext) is located along the axis connecting the source and target language and culture (Osimo 2000-2004a), depending on the influence they exert on each other. Linguistic creolization makes the prototext become translucent in the metatext and this, together with the idea that every translation is an attempt to recreate the prototext, gives also the illusion that translation should be a genre (D’Haen, Grübel, Lethen 1989). This theory, however, is “incompatible with the basic characteristics of the translation as a specific type of metatext” (D’Haen, Grübel, Lethen 1989) and with the impossibility of detecting stylistic features which could be exclusively ascribed to translation (Popovič 1975). On the one hand, in fact, we observe that also in a given prototext can we find exotic elements (coming from other cultural systems); and on the other, “the speech act of translating is not inevitably bound to have a distorting effect on the particular type of genre to which the text belongs” (D’Haen, Grübel, Lethen 1989).

Cultural borrowing fabrizio during each textual transfer process from a source culture to the target culture, the first alternative to transferring an expression verbatim is the cultural borrowing. When it is proved that there is no target culture expression suitable for translating a source culture expression, the translator may resort to it. A good example is the German word Weltanschauung, first attested in English in 1868: it was defined as “a philosophy of life”; “a conception of the world”. A crucial condition for cultural borrowing is that the textual context of the target text should clarify the meaning of the borrowed expression. This expedient is most frequent in texts about history, or philosophy, or on social, political or anthropological matters, where the simplest solution is to give a definition of terms like glasnost’, perestrojka, and then to use the original source language word in the target text. The fact that the Saussurean linguistic terms langue and parole are borrowed from the French refers to their precise and specific sense, even though the option of translating them in “language” and “speaking” would exist. Furthermore, if some terms have already passed into the target language without significant change in meaning, thus constituting standard conventional translatants of the borrowed words, the translator may not be faced with a significant decision at all. So, for example, such expressions as joie de vivre, savoir-faire, sauerkraut, taboo, pizza, mafia and others can be seen as naturalized conventional equivalents of the corresponding foreign expressions. Obviously, these terms which are now part of the ‘exotic’ culture present some spelling variants in the target languages, as the case of the Italian word tabù. When dealing with cultural borrowing, translators should be aware that words in the source language may often have more than one meaning, or very diverse meanings, in the target languages. If compared to exoticism (the Italian version is forestierismo), cultural borrowing is different in two ways: first of all, it does not adapt source language expression to target language form; secondly an exoticism frequently occurs in epics and folk tales. Historically speaking, the root of cultural borrowing refers to the claim by certain races or ethnicities that a kind of style, food, dress, behavior belongs to their group. When these cultural practices are performed by those who would not be considered to be part of that culture, cultural borrowing is used. In fact, creating and maintaining static, exclusive boundaries between different ethnic groups is unrealistic. Borrowing is inevitable, and can be a tool towards coalition-building among the various groups. Though a group can claim a practice as their own, sharing and borrowing will inevitably occur. When a person is placed in another culture, some of the culture’s attributes may take the place of some attitudes, values, or ways of doing things that some people learned in their home culture. Borrowing in translation is not always justified by lexical gaps in the target language; it may be used as a way to preserve the local color of the word, or out of fear of losing some of the semiotic and cultural aspects of the word if it is translated. Since language is an integral part of culture, translators need not only proficiency in two languages, they also must be familiar with the two cultures. When dealing with the term “cultural borrowing”, it is worth introducing the concept of realia. As a rule, literary texts contain a number of realia, that is, in cultural terms, the name of culture-specific items and historic events, characteristic of the source culture but often unknown in the target culture. The term realia itself has two meanings. It is either used to denote objects, ideas, symbols or habits (a number of them connected with eating and drinking), specific to a given language community, or it may be used to name these things or concepts. Thus, for instance tarhonya may be an item of Hungarian realia, in the sense of egg barley, described as “a hard dough kneaded from flour, egg, a little water and salt, then is rolled until it falls apart into barley-size pieces; these are put out in the sun to dry; and are eaten cooked in water (sometimes having been turned in some hot lard first)”. On the other hand, tarhonya may be a Hungarian word which stands for this special kind of barley.

Cultural factor valentina rancati

Cultural implicity giulia ceriotti

Cultural peculiarities

Cultural Studies (Cristina Pigozzi): Cultural studies are a field of study which has been established as an academic discipline since 1964, date of the creation of the Centre for Contemporary Cultural Studies (CCCS) at the University of Birmingham. Cultural studies have an interdisciplinary character: they combine political economy, communication studies, sociology, social theory, literary theory, media theory, cultural anthropology, philosophy, history, art criticism and other disciplines to study cultural phenomena in various societies; they especially concentrate on how a particular phenomenon relates to matters of ideology, nationality, ethnicity, social class, and gender. From the 1970s onward, the work of scholars such as Richard Hoggart, Raymond Williams, Stuart Hall, Dick Hebdige, Angela McRobbie and many others has created an international intellectual movement based on cultural studies. Cultural studies is not a homogeneous theory, but a diverse field of study encompassing many different approaches, methods and academic perspectives. Despite differences, all branches of cultural studies recognize as one of their central scope the research on “the relationship between social and individual agency, between the individual or social subject’s ability to determine its own history and condition, and the influence of what has been differently named as ‘structure’, ‘system’, etc.” (Polezzi), attempting an analysis of cultural phenomena which is neither simply deterministic nor naively based on notions of individual choice. Cultural studies aim to examine cultural practices in relation to power, understanding culture in all its complex forms and within specific social and political contexts. In the perspective of cultural studies, cultural practices do not only include traditional ‘high culture’, but also and most of all everyday life practices and objects and the meanings and uses people attribute to them, so that the idea of text in this context does not only include written language, but also films, photographs, paintings, fashion, hairstyles, etc.. Since translation is a practice which involves not only a text and a linguistic system, but also the whole cultural context in which the text has been produced, translation studies and cultural studies are closely related. The work of the Tel Aviv school and in particular of Gideon Toury and Itmar Even-Zohar has been an important connection between the two fields of study. With his Polysystem Theory, according to which literature is an element part of a complex network of different integrated and interconnected systems referred to as ‘culture’, Even-Zohar has underlined how translation is most of all an intercultural and social communication phenomenon rather than simply a linguistic one. Culture is not a fixed unit, but a dynamic process that has an influence on several aspects of a text produced in its framework. Writers can be considered as ‘products’ of a particular culture, in the sense that culture is a way to perceive reality: it provides the categories used to classify and to understand it. In each text there are things that are said (explicit) and things that are not said because they are obvious (implicit). The implicit and explicit elements depend on the particular culture in which the text is produced and different cultures give different functions to implicit information. Moreover, the chronotopic coordinates of the metatext can be different from the prototext ones. Intercultural differences can only be detected by comparing different cultural systems, that translators have to know and understand in order to carry out a negotiation process which enables an enriching interaction between the source and the target culture. To explain the relationship existing between different cultures, Lotman has introduced the term ‘semiosphere’, inspired by the concept of ‘biosphere’ used in natural science. According to Lotman, as a biosphere is “the totality and the organic whole of living matter” (Lotman 2000: 125), by analogy the semiosphere is a “semiotic continuum”, a heterogeneous system constantly interacting with other similar structures. The points of contact between different systems (also part of a heterogeneous space of a higher order) enable the emergence of new meaning. Thus, “the unit of semiosis, the smallest functioning mechanism is not a separate language, but the whole semiotic space of culture in question” (Lotman 2000: 125). Translators stand at the border between different cultural systems and their work represents an instrument for mutual exchange. According to the strategy they chose to adopt, which can be more or less oriented towards acceptability or adequacy, translators deal in different ways with cultural elements present in the source text. If the dominant of the translation is acceptability, translators will produce a text completely corresponding to the norms of the target culture, in which foreign cultural elements will be modified or substituted in order to be perceived as part of the receiving culture. On the contrary, if the dominant chosen is adequacy, cultural elements of the source text alien to the receiving culture will be maintained, so that readers can recognize them as part of a different culture. Even if acceptable translations are easier to read, adequate translations give a far higher contribution to mutual cultural enrichment.

Cultural substitution

Cultural translation (or Cultural approach)

Cultural transplantation (marta donati) it is the highest possible degree of cultural transposition, at the extreme end of the scale drawn by Hervey and Higgins and opposite to exoticism. According to the strategy of cultural transplantation, every element of the prototext deep-rooted in the source culture is replaced by alternatives offered by the target culture. The text generated by this process cannot be called a translation, because the prototex has been mainly rewritten rather than translated, and its defying features seems to be disappeared: in this case, the correct term to use would be adaptation. Cultural transplantations can however become successful works, even if they do not comply with standard translation practices. “Hollywood's remakes of European films are familiar cases of this. An example of a transplantation of an Italian film into America is Arau's A Walk in the Clouds, adapted from Blasetti's Quattro passi fra le nuvole” (Hervey, Higgins 2000:28). Not only movies, but also “Some of Robert Garioch's Scots translations of Giuseppe Belli's Sonetti are examples of successful cultural transplantation from nineteenth-century Rome to twentieth-century Edinburgh” (e.g. Garioch in Hervey, Higgins 2000:28).

Cultural transposition (marta donati) it is a generally accepted definition used by Hervey and Higgins to cover all kinds of possible translations from one language into another that depart from a literal approach. They have been visualized on a scale that ranges from exoticism to cultural transplantation, through cultural borrowings, calque and communicative translation. Every cultural transposition involves a certain degree of exoticization or localization of the metatext: it depends on the strategy chosen by the translator according to his model reader and his communicative intent, but it always aims at immediacy of impact and understanding.

Decision-making, Translation as (Silvia Romano) It is a process inextricably connected with problem-solving activities. There are two types of knowledge that a human being must possess in order to solve a problem: declarative and procedural (Ryle 1949). Declarative knowledge (knowing what) is the knowledge and the experience that a person has stored in his/her memory. Procedural knowledge (knowing how) is the strategic knowledge to which a person has access, basically they should know what to do in a specific situation in order to obtain the desired goal. In translation it is a very complicated issue, because the purpose of this activity is to reproduce a source text in another language keeping in mind not only its semantic, functional, pragmatic and stylistic dimension but also the needs and expectations of the target text reader (Baker 1998). There is an important distinction to make when talking about decision making: macrocontext and microcontext. When translators have to make a decision at the macrocontext level they need a strategy for the totality of the text to be translated, posing themselves questions such as who says what, what is the communicative intention, what is the spatio-temporal setting, etc. But when a translator handles microcontextual problems, especially in literary texts, they have to deal with various complicating factors such as semantic vagueness, complex syntax, metaphores, wordplay, irony, collocations, and so on (Baker 1992). Translators that encounter a situation of conflict and search for an optimal or near-optimal solution will find limited help in problem-solving strategies because microcontextual problems and their solutions cannot be generalized. So far decision-making in translation has been relegated to the edges of the discipline, and there is a general uncertainty as to whether the translator is actually enganged in genuine decision-making procedures at all (Baker 1998).  In order to clarify this issue it is useful to focus the attention on the behaviour that precedes the choice, namely the factors that lead to make a choice. In order to understand this process, think aloud protocols have been employed, in particular with students of translation.

Decoding (Lûdskanov) process consisting in the extrapolation of some information from a message coded in a specific language. It is the reverse of coding. Decoding is a stage of the translation process preceding mental working through and recoding.

Deep recoding

Definition daniela orsolin is a statement giving the meaning of a word or expression. Aristotle ‘invented’ the prototypical form of a definition, which is still valid and also very important in some fields of translation studies – as e.g. in terminology. According to Aristotle, the definition formal structure resembles an equation with the definiendum (what is to be defined) on the left side and the definiens (the part which is doing the defining) on the right side. The definiens, therefore, consists of two parts: genus proximum (the nearest superior concept) and the differentiae specificae (the distinguishing characteristics). An example: a dictionary (definiendum) is a book (genus proximum) in which words are listed alphabetically, together with their meanings (differentiae specificae). Hebenstreit (2007: 200) summarizes further Aristotle’s definition rules as follows: 1) definitions should convey the essence of the defined concept, they should be adequate (an inadequate definition is: “a nose landing gear is a unit located near the nose of the aircraft”); 2) they should not be circular (a circular definition is: “textiles are products of the textiles industry”); 3) they must not contain any form of negation (a negative definition is: “a deciduous tree is a tree other than an evergreen tree”); 4) they must not be formulated in an obscure language. As Hebenstreit says, definitions can be seen as a central working tool for researchers, since they provide access to the concepts that form the constructing elements of a theory (2007:198). There is also a modern approach to definition theory, which is purely formal and – according to Hebenstreit – not very significant in translation studies (2007:201). There are two more types of definition besides the Aristotelian one, according to Hebenstreit. Firstly, the definition by enumeration of the concept species on the same level of abstraction (extensional definition), e.g. “a chess piece is a king, a queen, a bishop, a knight, a rook or a pawn”. Secondly, the definition by enumeration of the parts of the concept (partitive definition), e.g. “the planets of the solar system are Mercury, Venus, Earth, Mars, Jupiter, Saturn, Uranus, Neptune and Pluto”. In terminology, the validity of a definition is restricted in scope and time, because the specific characteristics of the definiendum have to be chosen on the basis of the domain in which the concept is being used – and concepts are constantly changing (Hebenstreit 2007: 203-204). He gives further alternative definitions, such as definition by context or graphics, but these are commonly considered as definitional aids.

Degree of differentiation (or Degree of precision)

Deixis (Irene Pozzi): The term “deixis” derives from the ancient Greek word deíknymi (“I show, I indicate”) and etymologically means “indication”, because its presence is perceived as a sort of `gesture´ implicitly showing where and when the communicative act is taking place (Osimo 2000-2004). Concretely, in a text or a discourse, deixis is a set of elements implicitly referring to the extralinguistic context of the utterance: the identity of the speaker or of the addressee, their space-time coordinates, their gestures etc. Such elements usually include personal pronouns (I, me, them, etc.), demonstrative adjectives (this, that, etc.), adverbs of place (here, near, there, etc.), adverbs of time (now, today, before, etc.), tenses and also articles. In this case deixis is a form of exophora, as special words or grammatical markings are used to indicate a situation or an environment external to the text. This kind of deixis include (Loos 2007): empathetic deixis, person deixis, place deixis, social deixis and time deixis. However, deixis can sometimes make reference to a specific portion of the discourse or of the text itself. For example, the deictic “this” can be used to refer to a content the speaker has just stated ̶ “The article rightly observes that the environmental costs of economic activity are sometimes borne by other countries. This means that market-based incentives…”(Scarpa 2001: 145)̶ or to a particular sound which has just been heard”This is what phoneticians call a creaky voice” (Loos 2007). In this case, deixis becomes a form of endophora as it creates intralingual links. From a linguistic point of view, deixis is of paramount importance because it expresses a particular view of the world: the view of the speaker. The speaker’s position in space and time is used as a point of reference to indicate other references’ position in space and time. In this way, the speaker becomes the “deictic center” of the discourse and imposes his/her own view of reality on the addressee (Dirven and Marjolijn 1999: 7-8), who must be well aware of the “when and where” if s/he wants to decode the message correctly. In this sense, deixis can be considered a form of communication which takes place in a limited world, where the speaker assumes that the interlocutor belongs to his/her same reality and does not care about the existence of other realities (Osimo 2000-2004). Therefore, from a translation point of view, linguistic mediators must be aware of this particular value of deixis in order to decode the text correctly and thus opt for any suitable change in the metatext ̶ according to the specific kind of translation (dominant, target reader) they are dealing with. For example, in specialized translation we can often find cultural-specific elements which are supposed to be adapted for the receiving audience. If an author writes : “Imagine television in the 1940s. There was almost no programming, the pictures were small and fuzzy, and why «of course» black and white” (Scarpa 2001: 118), the translator must be aware of the fact that the exophoric deixis to the 1940s might not be true in the historical context of another country and that the reference probably needs changing, or a metatextual treatment. In some other cases, problems may arise when deixis is expressed by using a demonstrative such as this (see example above, Scarpa 2001: 145), which in another language could result in some inelegant neuter form. In virtue of this complexity, it is important for translators to weigh the value of deixis carefully and always control their tendency to manipulate it, so as to avoid deep modifications in the attitude of the text towards the reader and thus in the author’s strategy (Osimo 2000-2004).

Denotation: (from the Latin denotare, to mark out, specify) it refers to the strict, dictionary meaning of a word, devoid of any emotion, attitude or color. It is used in contrast with "connotation", which refers to the free associations connected to a certain word or the emotional suggestions related to it. For example, if you look up the word snake in a dictionary, one of its denotative meanings is "any of numerous scaly, legless, sometimes venomous reptiles having a long, tapering, cylindrical body and found in most tropical and temperate regions"; whereas the connotations for the word snake could include "evil" or "danger". So, using the terminology introduced by Saussure (1857-1913) we can say that the denotative meaning of a signifier (signifiant) is intended to communicate the general semantic content of the represented thing or idea. In the case of a lexical word, say book, the intention is to do no more than describe the physical object. Any other meanings or implications will be connotative meanings. According to John Sinclair the values attached to lexical items are intrinsically denotative values. The term "denotative" describes the way lexical items refer to a "referent" ("object" according to the terminology used by Peirce) in the real world, whether concrete or abstract. In semantic terms, it would be more accurate to say that lexical items themselves refer to the extension of an entity. The extension of an entity is any past, present or future occurrence of that entity. For example, the word rat refers to countless millions of different individual animals that have existed, now exist or will exist in the future. But in spite of the fact that these animals are all different in some way (colour, size, etc.) the word rat denotes them all; however, the denotative meaning of rat only covers the core prototype meaning – roughly a four-legged animal, distinguished by a long tail, whiskers, etc. – while in the wider world people often associate a whole range of other features with the word rat, for example disease, evil etc. Thus, words can easily assume a connotative value depending on the context in which they are used, and the purposes of the user. In the utterance "I would stay clear of that rat Jones!" the listener would not think that Jones is a real rat, but that Jones is a despicable person. The word rat in its denotative sense has its Italian translatant in ratto, which refers to the same basic extension, and therefore these items can be considered interlingual near-synonyms in the sense that they can usually replace one another in translation. But in the case of the above utterance the word rat is usually not translated according to its denotative value but with a word expressing a similar connotative meaning in the Italian culture such as verme, preserving the zoological metaphor. In Opera aperta as well as in Lector in fabula,Umberto Eco deals with the dichotomy "connotative text/denotative text" using the expressions testo aperto/ testo chiuso (open text/ closed text). A denotative text (instruction handbook, railway timetable, telephone book etc.) can be interpreted just in one way because the words it contains refer to the langue (the term used by Saussure to identify the language as a sum of communication rules). It can happen that when a connotative expression becomes popular in a particular culture it acquires a denotative value which is reported into the dictionary, so people do not always need a context to understand it. This is the case of idiomatic expressions. They show us that the sign system begins with a simple meaning that is then glossed as new usages are developed. The Danish scholar Louis Hjelmslev (1899-1965) states that denotation is the first step of the signification process, while connotation is the second one.

Descriptive translation studies it is one of the two objectives of pure translation studies, the other one being translation theory. This concept was introduced for the first time by Toury in his “map” of translation studies. It is the pure description of translation phenomena. In Descriptive Translation Studies (DTS) what is important is not the evaluation of the translation behavior but its description and explanation (Anderman and Rogers 2007:14). According to Holmes' theory there are three different kinds of DTS focusing on a particular aspect of the translation process: product-oriented DTS, process-oriented DTS and function-oriented DTS (Holmes 1994). Toury thought that DTS is fundamental in order to wholly understand the translation process and that it plays an important role in translator training and in translation criticism.

Destination (Virginia Cavalletti): is one of the elements in Shannon’s system of communication, introduced in his article A mathematical theory of communication (1948). “The destination is the person (or thing) for whom the message is intended” (Shannon 1948:2).

Diachronic aspect of translation

Diachronic point of view

Diacritical mark (Anna Paradiso): the term “diacritical” derives from the Greek word διακριτικός (diakritikos, "distinguishing") and refers to all small signs added to letters. The most frequently used diacritical marks which are also present in different alphabets are: the acute accent ['] as in the English café , the grave accent [] (French vis-à-vis), the breve [ ̆ ] (Russian bajdarka, canoe), the caron or háček [̌ ] (Croatian kvačica, clothes peg), the circumflex [̂ ] (French raison d’être), the cedilla [̡ ] (French garçon), the tilde [ ͂ ] (Spanish señor), the ring [] (Swedish ål, eel). It is important to make a distinction between the dieresis or trema and the umlaut, which are both represented with the same diacritical mark [ ̈̈ ], but have two different functions. As a matter of fact, the former indicates a phonological dieresis, i.e. the vowel should be pronounced isolated from the letter which precedes it, as in the French naïf /naif/, whereas the latter changes the pronunciation of the vowel, as in the German Ägypten /ε’gyptən/, Egypt. There are also two types of dot: the over dot, as in the Turkish town İnstambul, and the under dot. Diacritical marks, also called “diacritics”, mostly appear above or below a letter and are used to change the phonetic value of a letter (as for the Russian i and j), to modify the pronunciation of the syllable or word (Russian \lka, fir), to make a distinction among homographs (for example between the verb resume and the noun résumé), to abbreviate words (such as the titlo for in old Slavic texts: Gospodь, Lord). Furthermore it is important to underline that every language has its own particular way of dealing with diacritics within the alphabetic system. In the French alphabetical order there is no difference between simple letters and letters with diacritical marks; by contrast, the Scandinavian languages consider letters with diacritics ä, ö and å totally different from the simple ones and put them at the end of the alphabet. In German letters with diacritics are generally considered as variant of the underlying letter and are alphabetized immediately after the correspondent unmarked letter: for instance, when two words differ only by an umlaut, the word without it is placed before the other one (e.g. schon comes before schön). In the Spanish alphabet order the grapheme ñ is considered different from n, and therefore collocated between n and o. Finally it is worth to say that nowadays we are witnessing to the brutal practice of omitting diacritical marks while passing from a language into another. However, thanks to modern computer technology it is now possible to maintain these marks in all types of electronic texts, too.

Diagrammatic translation

Didactic fidelity

Direct translation federica alba “Direct translation corresponds to the idea that translation should convey the same meaning as the original. It requires the receptors to familiarise themselves with the context envisaged for the original text” (Gutt 1990). It could identify a translation made directly from the original text. In this case, it is the opposite of indirect translation. This is defined as “translation done via an intermediary translation in a third language, not directly from the original” (Vinay and Darbelnet 1958). According to Dollerop, indirect translation “should be reserved for situations where two parties must communicate by means of a third intermediary realization which has no legitimate audience” (2000:19). This is a typical case that could happen in a court of law when a deposition is rendered from Thai into English and then translated from English into Danish. But the indirect translation is also common in literary translation. “Also defined ‘second-hand translation’, translation of a translation. The metatext used as a prototext for the second translation process is called ‘intermediate’” (Osimo 2004: 233). It could happen because the original language of the first translation is not well-known by the target community. An example is the translation of Macbeth into Finnish by Fredrick Lagervall, which drew upon a German version as source text. Direct translation could also mean word-by-word translation (machine translation). The most important component in this type of translation is a fixed correspondence between each word in the two languages. There are some problems related to this translating process such as ambiguous words, inflection, word order, identification of homographs and of compound-nouns.

Direction of translation (or Directionality) (Silvia Romano) It usually refers to the direction into which a translator is working, that is from his/her mother tongue into a foreign language or vice versa. But a translator could also work from one language of habitual use into another, i.e. Catal to Spanish/Spanish to Catalan, or from a foreign language into another (Baker 1998). For he general public there is no distinction between translating into or from the mother tongue. But translators know it is very rare to have symmetrical linguistic competence. According to Newmark (1988: 3) “Translating into your language of habitual use is the only way you can translate naturally and accurately and with maximum effectiveness”. Most of the international organizations expect translators to work into their mother tongue and it has been made explicit in UNESCO’s 1976 Recommendations on the legal protection of translators and translations and the practical means to improve the status of translators: ‘A translator should, as far as possible, translate into his, or her, mother tongue or into a language of which he or she has a mastery equal to that of his or her mother tongue’ (Picken 1989: 245). In English-speaking countries the unmarked use of translation means translation into the mother tongue whereas the term to express a translation from the mother tongue into a foreign language is “inverse translation”. In French the term “thème” is used to indicate a translation from the mother tongue into a foreign language while the term “version” indicates the translation into the mother tongue. Russian, German and Japanese have no specific termonology for directionality, while in Spanish, Italian, Portuguese, Arabic and Chinese directionality is indicated by the adjective direct or inverse. Recently this terminology has been used also in English (Baker 1998).

Disagreement between translator and editor (rOBERTA MIRAGLIA ) before analyzing in detail the strategies translation editors apply to evaluate translations, it might be useful to determine what is meant by quality. In this case, one of the more reliable sources is Joseph M. Juran, pioneer of Quality Management. According to him, quality can be defined in two different ways: 1) “ "Quality" means those features of products which meet customer needs and thereby provide customer satisfaction. In this sense, the meaning of quality is oriented to income. The purpose of such higher quality is to provide greater customer satisfaction and, one hopes, to increase income. However, providing more and/or better quality features usually requires an investment and hence usually involves increases in costs. Higher quality in this sense usually "costs more" ”. 2) “"Quality" means freedom from deficiencies-freedom from errors that require doing work over again (rework) or that results in field failures, customer dissatisfaction, customer claims and so on. In this sense, the meaning of quality is oriented to costs, and higher quality usually "costs less".” Obviously, the difference is that in the former case the focus is on the customer’s point of view, while in the latter the focus is on the company’s point of view. As far as translation is concerned, translations are the very products that need to be evaluated. Their quality, of course, depends on the appropriateness of the translation strategies adopted by translators, who should try to satisfy the customers’ and the clients’ needs as much as they can. According to the Estonian scholar Peeter Torop, translation critique deals with the translator’s poetics, and not with translation in general (Torop 2000:65). What he means by this is that a good translation critic is supposed to distinguish the translators’ poetics from the standard translation process by identifying the changes wittingly made on translations, that display the translators’ styles. Before judging the final products of translation, that is to say metatexts, critics need to analyze the translation strategy mainly by identifying the translation shifts performed. Martínez and Hurtado (2001) introduced a functional evaluation model, according to which “mistakes” or translation shifts need to be evaluated on the basis of the effects they produce on metatexts and on the receiving culture, especially focusing on: the metatext in general, the level of consistency and cohesion in the metatext, how much of the sense of the prototext has been altered, the communicative efficacy of the metatext, the negative effects on the translation purpose. The Italian expert Benedetto Vertecchi (1998:35) suggests the creation of an evaluation table so that the critics’ activity can be influenced by subjectivity as little as possible. The main categories that can possibly be included in the evaluation table proposed by the Italian scholar Bruno Osimo (2004:104) are: 1) General transfer skills, which imply the translators’ ability to: identify dominants, identify the model reader, identify the cultural differences, make the right decisions as far as cultural elements are concerned; 2) Lexical shifts (omissions, additions, radical shifts of meaning, grammar-category shifts; 3) Syntactical choices, according to which translators reproduce the marked structures identified in the prototext or simply introduce a standard structure; 4) Cohesion, which implies the identification and the reproduction of functional words (words scattered over the prototext functioning as intratextual references within it); 5) Text’s poetics, which implies the identification and the reproductions of conceptual words (words conveying important concepts within the text); 6) Author’s poetics, which implies the identification and the reproductions of expressive fields (repetitions of words, expressions, sentences typical of an author); 7) Group identity, that is to say the ability to identify and reproduce realia (cultural elements) and intertextual references; 8) Individual identity, that is to say the ability to identify and reproduce deictics; 9) Technical knowledge, that is to say the ability to identify and reproduce punctuation; 10) Grammar shifts; 11) Syntactical shifts; 12) Spelling; 13) Consistency. Having said that, it should be added that the fundamental condition for a good cooperation between translators and translation critics is objectiveness. As far as the former are concerned, objectiveness implies that translators should have a self-criticism attitude, which allows them to acknowledge the mistakes identified by editors or justify their choices whenever they think that the editors’ objections are groundless. At the same time, a great deal of objectiveness is required to translation editors, too. As a matter of fact, editors often intervene on metatexts without following rigorous criteria. First of all, they often review metatexts without a parallel comparison with prototexts, editing just according to the aesthetic and readability criteria adopted by the publishing house they work for. In this way, they don’t take into consideration the key element they should base their criticism on: the author’s intention. When referring to author’s intention, several aspects are involved, i.e. his style, his syntactical, semantic, lexical choices, his use of punctuation, etc. All these elements determine the author’s style, which is very likely to be neglected when editing metatexts without comparing them with their prototexts. Acting this way, translation editors risk not only to trample on the authors’ poetics, but also on the translators’ poetics; so, they should try to base their observations on well grounded criteria, in order to comply with their very task, that is to say putting the finishing touches to metatexts, making them ready for the market, without neglecting the translators’ authority.

Disambiguation, see Semantic disambiguation

Disambiguation: It is the process through which a word, sentence or text is given a precise interpretation and sense. This phenomenon happens because, in spite of language ambiguity, communication has sometimes a practical function, to fulfill which it is necessary to choose among possible alternatives. In poetry, for example, ambiguity can be preserved, since no practical result must necessarily follow from interpretation. Ambiguity is the property of words and sentences or entire texts as being undefined or without a clear definition and thus having an undefined meaning. A word, phrase, sentence, or other message is called “ambiguous” if it can be interpreted in more than one way. In particular, lexical ambiguity is typical of those contexts that are insufficient to determine the sense of a single word that has more than one potential meaning (which is most often the case). For example, the word “bank” has several meanings, including “financial institution” and “edge of a river”, but if someone says “I am going to the bank to withdraw some money”, the intended meaning is clear. Syntactic ambiguity arises when a sentence can be parsed in more than one way. “He ate the sweets on the sofa”, for example, could mean that “he ate those sweets which were on the sofa” (as opposed to those that were on the table), or it could mean that “he was sitting on the sofa when he ate the sweets”. Semantic ambiguity occurs when a word or concept has a diffuse meaning based on widespread or informal usage. When the semantic field of a word is large, ambiguities connected to the use of such a word are all the greater. This is the case, for example, with idiomatic expressions whose definitions are rarely or never well-defined, and are presented in the context of a larger argument that invites a conclusion. For example, “You could do with a new place where to live. How about moving to London?” The clause “You could do with” presents a lot of possible interpretation. Lexical ambiguity is in contrast with semantic ambiguity. The former represents a choice between a finite number of known and meaningful context-dependent interpretations. The latter represents a choice between any number of possible interpretations, none of which may have a standard agreed-upon meaning. Therefore, open texts, such as literary texts, are ambiguous, and this feature is necessary so that they can be reinterpreted in more than way. It’s not the translator who has to disambiguate those parts of the texts that are ambiguous. The reader of the receiving culture must have the possibility to decide how to interpret the text.

Discovery of a style

Discovery of a text

Documentary translation Aina Christiane Nord distinguishes between two basic types of translation process: documentary translation (preservation of the original exoticizing setting) and instrumental translation (adaptation of the setting to the target culture). If a translator focuses on the transmission of the original flavor for readers’ reference, documentary translation is to be preferred. A documentary translation can be seen as “a document of a past communicative action in which the source culture sender made an offer of information to source culture recipient by means of a ST” (Nord 1991: 72). In documentary translation, the receivers of the target text are informed about a communication event of which they do not form a part. A documentary translation is manifestly a document of another text; it is overtly a translation of something else. Insofar, as it presents itself as a report of another communication, it is a bit like reported speech (Nord 1997). In documentary translation the metatext reader is always aware of dealing with a translated text. Nord highlights four types of documentary translation, based on the focalization on different aspects of the prototext: “word-for-word” or “interlineal” translation, “literal” or “grammatical” translation, “philological” or “learned” translation, “exoticizing” translation. In “word-for-word” or “interlineal” translation, the main focalization is on the morphological, lexical and syntactical structure of the prototext, which is reproduced in the metatext without any acknowledgment of its textual coherence. In fact, “word-for-word” translations cannot be read easily, above all when the two languages have very different sentence structures (Osimo 2004). “The other subtypes of documentary translation are less extreme, but tend to achieve functionality, nonetheless, and acceptability of the text by the reader. If a documentary translation is intended to reproduce the words of the original, adapting syntactic structures and idiomatic use of vocabulary to TL norms, we speak of a ‘literal’ or ‘grammatical’ translation (for example, when reading the speech of a foreign politician in news texts)” (Osimo 2004). If the metatext produces the prototext rather literally, but adds the necessary cultural or linguistic information in footnotes or glossaries, we speak of a “philological” or “learned” translation. Finally, a form of translation referred to as “exoticizing” translation is frequently used with classical texts and often produces an “exotic” effect on target readers, while the original readers find their own culture reflected in the text. Documentary translations then usually have a metatextual function and require the most careful and deep translation-oriented analysis. A documentary translation should be possible for all texts, whereas instrumental translation depends on the receiver’s capacity to respond to the subject or content of the prototext.

Domesticating translation (or Domestication) (Deponti): according to Lawrence Venuti, domestication and foreignization are two translation strategies which take place at two levels: the macro-level (with the selection of source texts to be translated) and the micro-level (the methods used to translate them). The domestication method was first theorized by the famous German translation theorist Friedrich Schleiermacher, who claimed that this translation approach is aimed at keeping the reader still while leading the author close to the reader. For Venuti, “domestication” means translating in a fluent, transparent and idiomatic way which tends to mask the foreignness of the source text and to conform to the canon, the values and the needs of the target culture. He said: “[a] fluent strategy performs a labor of acculturation which domesticates the foreign text, making it intelligible and even familiar to the target-language reader, providing him or her with the narcissistic experience of recognizing his or her own culture in a cultural other, enacting an imperialism that extends the dominion of transparency with other ideological discourses over a different culture” (Venuti, 1992: 5). As it has been said, the main elements that characterize domesticating translation are fluency and transparency. When a translation is “fluent", it can be read ‘smoothly’, without any interruption imposed by words that the target reader may not understand. It does not mean that the words used have to be simple but that the flow of the target text should not be interrupted by the excessive presence of words that seem to be directly taken from the source-, rather than the target-, language vocabulary. According to Venuti, in order to produce a fluent translation, translators have to do an invisble work, creating the illusory effect of transparency so that the target text seems ‘natural’, not translated, not a copy of the source text. Domesticating translation implies replacing source language names or chronotopes with those of the target language. Venuti also thinks that domesticating translation is linked to the cultural hegemony of the target culture, revealing its ethnocentric attitude towards foreign cultures. For example, the dominance of Anglo-American culture is made evident not only by the low number of foreign books translated into English, but also by the fact that they are translated according to the values of the target culture and thus following a domesticating strategy based upon fluidity and transparency.

Dominant: the notion of "dominant" was created by the Russian Formalists. Roman Jakobson (1935) defines it as "the focusing component of a work of art: it rules, determines, and transforms the remaining components. It is the dominant which guarantees the integrity of the structure". The dominant is culture-specific, i.e. it is influenced by the historical period in which the text is produced and the textual genre to which it belongs. For example, in poetry the dominant often is the aesthetic function. Part of such a function may be the innovatory element, the breaking of textual canon. However, the innovativeness of a text may eventually fade, causing the aforementioned shift of dominant. There may be a shift in the perceived dominant according to the changes occurring in the chronotopicalcoordinates of the writer and the reader. The dominant determines a hierarchic structure of primary and secondary elements. The latter are called "subdominants". In interlingual translation, the prototext has many possible dominants for the transmitting culture. While elaborating a translation strategy, the translator has to identify the dominant of the metatext for the receiving culture. The dominant of the text for the receiving culture may not coincide with the dominant for the source culture. There may be two reasons for that. First, the target reader of the receiving culture may be different from the one planned by the author of the prototext. Second, we have to consider the differences between the two cultures, which determines a different degree of implicitness of the intertextual references.

Dubbing: (Chiara  Romano) the word “dubbing” means the replacement of a soundtrack, as music, sound effects, dialogues and natural sound after photography. This is made with a technique called post-synchronization, or Automated Dialogue Replacement (ADR). In film production, a sound mixer records dialogue during shooting, but different issues, as traffic and animal noise, can cause the production sound to be unusable. When the film is in post-production, a supervising sound editor reviews all of the dialogue in the film and decides what has to be replaced using the ADR technique. Dubbing is also a form of language transfer where dialogues of the transmitting culture are replaced with the language of the receiving culture, also called localization. In Europe, especially in France, Germany, Italy, Spain and Switzerland foreign-language films, television series and videos are dubbed into the language of the receiving culture making them more accessible. "Dubbing” can be defined as the oral translation of oral language and it requires the substitution of the voice of each character on the screen by the voice of a dubber, most of the times an actor who doubles as dubber (Osimo 2004:134). The aim is to get a product that seems natural and authentic rather than a translation and, above all, that matches the lip movement, a problem that differentiates translation of audiovisual works from fiction or any other type of translation. The compatibility of the dubber’s voice with the actor’s body expressions, represent an extremely complicated issue. Italy, the country where dubbing is most used, has a long dubbing tradition dating back to the 20s. Dubbed movies limit cultural contact and therefore generate an audience that doesn’t think about cultural differences and doesn’t even realize, that the actor’s moves don’t match his/her words (Osimo 2004:135-36). Each country has a different approach to movie translation, subtitles can be used instead of dubbing. It is the quickest and the cheapest method of translating contents, and is usually praised for the possibility to hear the original dialogue and voices of the actors. We should distinguish between interlingual and intralingual translation and between subtitles for the deaf and hard-of-hearing, called closed captioning, and subtitles as a linguistic aid (Osimo 2007:136). Although same-language subtitles are produced primarily for deaf and hard-of-hearing people, many hearing film and television viewers choose to use them, because their presence improves the understanding of the text. In subtitling translators should always keep in mind that dialogs belong to the spoken register, so that the result should be something between written and spoken language. A particular form of dubbing is the so-called "voice-over", i.e. the production technique where a speaker, broadcast live or pre-recorded, reads the translated text over images shown on the screen with the actors' voices in the background. The preference for dubbing or subtitling in different countries is largely based on decisions taken in the late 1920s and early 1930s. Film importers in Germany, Italy, France and Spain decided to dub the foreign voices, while the rest of Europe chose subtitles. The reason was merely economic, because dubbing is very expensive and therefore you require a large audience, larger for example than that of Finland, to justify the costs. It rapidly became an ideological policy in Germany, Italy and Spain, i.e. a sort of censorship that ensured that foreign views and ideas could be manipulated for the local audience; in fact dubbing makes it possible to create a dialogue which is totally different from the original. In those countries, where films are shown in the original language with subtitles, as in northern countries for example, dubbing is generally regarded as something unnatural. In Italy, Germany or Spain, on the other hand, dubbing is still the favored form of translation. None the less subtitling is growing quickly on pay TV also in these countries, maybe because younger generations, thanks their better competence in English, prefer the original dialogue.

Dubrovnik Charter alessia chiesura “FIT Translator’s Charter”. It is the first official document that has been drawn up in order to regulate the activity of translators and interpreters. Together with the Nairobi Recommendation adopted by the General Conference of UNESCO on 22 November 1976, it is one of the two points of reference for translators from all over the world. Both documents aim at stressing the social and cultural importance of translators and translation. The “FIT Translator’s Charter” was approved by the FIT Congress in Dubrovnik in 1963, and amended in Oslo on 9 July 1994. The acronym FIT stands for Fédération Internationale des Traducteurs (IFT: International Federation of Translators), an international federation of translators’ associations. In his book About translation&n