Inglese

Translation has been used for Practical purposes as political relations and trade, with Greeks.
Then, with Latins, for cultural purposes too: especially for juridical purposes.
In the middle age we remind Saint Jerome and Dante Alighieri, mostly for the translation of the
Bible.
The European translation Platform defined translation as the transposition of a message written in a
SOURCE TEXT into a message written in the TARGET one.

Three concepts:
Source text (the original one that had to be translated),
Virtual text (liberal and partial translation that needs a finding touch),
Target text (translation that reproduces the meanings of the source text and social reality of the
source language).

Three different ways of translating according to scholar Jackobson:

Intralinguistic Translation o rewarding (interpretation through linguistic signs of the same
language)
Interlinguistic Translation o translation proper (translation through linguistic signs of another
language
Intersemiotic Translation o transmutation (interpretation of linguistic signs through not linguistic
systems)

However according to Jackobson it is impossible to reproduce the social reality of a source

language into a target one, so the translator needs to innovate to bring back the real meanings.

According to Susan Bassnett-Mcguire, the function of translator, when he translates a poem, is to

interpret first, then to translate. This is a hermeneutic function.

To succeed in this, there are many ways of translating, which are:

Literal Translation: which is the WORD-FOR-WORD translation of source text for general
meaning
Metatextual Translation: the aim is to clarify the semantic values of source text
Author Translation: poet’s translation of high quality
Cultural Transposition: consist in finding a cultural counterpart of poetic forms from one culture to
another one
Metric Translation: reproduction of the original metric, adding the rhymed translation
Phonemic Translation: the Target text tries to reproduce the sound of Source text
Prose Translation: reproduce the meaning of the original text
Interpretation: same meaning of original text but the form changes
Interlinear Translation: it is a word-for-word translation, capable of expressing the “pure language”.
According to Toury, there must be a relationship between Source text and Target text, that is
necessary to report the social reality of the target language, but translation must not be falsification,
parody or adaptation.

Translation Studies
Born in the seventies of the 20th century with the aim of describing the phenomena of translation.
According to Susan Bassnett-McGuire, target text is an independent work and not secondary to the
original text, as a hermeneutic, creative and independent act. But the translator must know the
relationship between original text and the target cultural system. The scholar Venuti takes up the
concept of “DOMESTICATING TRANSLATION” and “FOREIGNIZING TRANSLATION”,
proposed by Schleinermach.

1) Domesticating: facilitate reading and comprehension of the target text for the reader,
deleting cultural differences
2) Foreignizing: keep the cultural distance to let the reader know the source culture

The language structure

Ferdinand De Saussure was the first linguistic to describe the nature of structure in terms of the
joining of words or syntagms to form meaningful clauses and sentences. The SYNTAGMATIC
RELATION is a semantic relation between words that are arranged in what we consider to be a
logical order. Instead, the PARADIGMATIC RELATION is a semantic relationship between words
that can be substituted with another word in the same category.
Another important thing to know is the division of semantic into:
1) DENOTATION: the usual meaning of the words
2) CONNOTATION: the sense implied of the words

Structuralism

It is a branch of linguistic that analyses the constituent part of a sentence structure. The linguistic
Bloomfield introduced the notion of Immediate Constituent Analysis, in which we can split
sentences, clauses and clause constituents into their component parts.

Main concepts in analysis of text organization

COHERENCE: it refers to the meaning of the words and their organization. It refers to the
“rhetorical” aspects of writing, which include developing and supporting argument as the thesis
statement development.
COHESION: it refers to the correct relation between the words. It focuses on the “grammatical”
aspects of writing, as the reiteration, a repetition of the same word or using a synonym, and the
conjunctions.

Competence and performances

Competence-based theories are centered on the belief that language is mainly a property of mind.
Instead, performance-based theories focus on language use in social contexts.
The linguist Chomsky was the first, in the 50s, who talks about the GENERATIVE GRAMMAR.
In other words, we belong a universal grammar, that is inside of us. We already know some
universal rules, according to Chomsky. In this case, we have the so-called “competence-based”
skill.

Reading process