This module aims to develop your basic translation knowledge and competences, thus enabling you to translate authentic generic texts into Italian, and to justify your own translation choices. The set source texts will be mainly informative and will include journalistic and academic texts among others. Before working on each text, you will be encouraged to do a contrastive analysis of similar published translations and parallel texts, thus reflecting on the textual and stylistic conventions characterising the English- and Italian-language texts. You will also learn to locate and use other online tools such as dictionaries, glossaries and corpora. Before translating a text, you will be invited to reflect on the genre to which their source text belongs, the cultural context in which it has circulated and the communicative function(s) it conveys. Based on the translation brief with which each source text will come, you will envisage the context in which your own translation will be received, its ideal readers and main function, enabling a discussion of the most appropriate translation approach. You will then be encouraged to focus on the style, register and any potentially problematic morpho-syntactic, lexical and pragmatic features characterising your source text, thus reflecting on the most appropriate translation strategies in light of the previous contextual analysis. This will help you to make informed and successful translation choices and to be able to justify them.
- Teacher: Maria Cristina Seccia