TEACHING ITALIAN PREPOSITIONS TO FOREIGNERS: A SEMANTIC-COGNITIVE APPROACH

This paper presents a series of reflections aimed at simplifying and rationalising the teaching of Italian prepositions in plurilingual learning classes, with particular attention paid to how to classify prepositions and what the best strategy is to introduce them.
Generally, Italian L2 books present prepositions in a disordered manner, spread over numerous units. Especially in monographs, prepositions are described within more organic categories; nevertheless, this setting exhausts its explanatory aims by matching the various cases to specific nomenclatures, similar to those used by logical analysis, and mostly exemplified by fictitious examples. We noticed that this strategy disorients the learner, who often fails to fully understand the meanings associated with the various Italian prepositions and opts for mnemonic learning. The danger is also that the student more willingly entrusts the translation of certain meanings from L1 to L2, resulting in fossilisations that are difficult to “correct.”
In the preparation of the didactic materials designed for students enrolled in the Centro di Cultura per Stranieri–University of Florence, Italian prepositions have been grouped into four macrocategories, which, from the semantic-cognitive point of view, have intrinsic affinities in many spoken languages, although they do not fall under the same grammatical nomenclature. In this way, the learner is given the opportunity to actively participate in the formation of an L2 competence and to consider the differences and similarities in L1.

Polish Research on Translations of Children’s Literature: The Glass Half Empty or Half Full?

The aim of this paper is to offer a comprehensive review of Polish research on translations of children’s and young adult literature. In the first part, I outline which disciplines are represented by Polish researchers who specialise in this subdiscipline, and then I present in chronological order the development of research from the 1960s, through the fertile period of the turn of the millennium, to the most recent years. Furthermore, I outline the general trends and orientations visible in research on this type of translation, placing particular attention on Polish researchers’ references to general research in Translation Studies.

The Translations of James Joyce’s The Cat and the Devil in Italy

This article sets out to explore the dynamics through which Joyce’s version of the legend of the “devil’s bridge”, narrated in a letter addressed to his grandson, Stevie, entered the world of children’s literature in Italy. This occurred just after the legend’s publication in the USA and the UK under the title The Cat and the Devil. It was immediately turned into a picturebook, a sophisticated literary product aimed at very young readers. In fact, far from being a mere text for toddlers, the Italian Il gatto e il diavolo is at the centre of several intersemiotic and interlinguistic translations that enhance the interpretative potential and richness of Joyce’s narration, already at the crossroads between folkloric and modernist translation. The comparative analysis of three different Italian translations of the story expressly addressed to children (the first by Enzo Siciliano, published by Emme Edizioni in 1967; the second by Giulio Lughi for Edizioni EL in 1980; and the third and more recent one by Ottavio Fatica for ESG in 2010) has highlighted that the differences between them can be ascribed to distinct translation projects, aimed at building bridges between young readers and Joyce’s work in various periods of the history of the Italian literary market for children.

TRANSLATING THE DASH: A CONTRASTIVE STUDY OF MACEDONIAN-ITALIAN

The aim of this article is to illustrate the strategies adopted to translate the dash from Macedonian into Italian in contemporary literary texts. This punctuation mark follows partially different principles in the two languages: morpho-syntactic and informative-textual ones in Macedonian and informative-textual principles in Italian. In addition, the source language reveals a frequent and systematic use of the dash, while it is not very common in the target language nor fully integrated into its punctuation system. From this analysis, two significant data have emerged. Firstly, it has been observed that, amongst the translating strategies of the dash from Macedonian into Italian, what prevails is the use of a “passe-partout” comma, which separates two clauses and replaces stronger punctuation marks, such as the colon, the semicolon, and the period. Secondly, it has been observed that the translation does not contribute to transferring the Macedonian model into the Italian language: the dash of the original text is kept in the target text only when there is equivalence between the two punctuation systems.

Of henryk sienkiewicz’s bestseller

Henryk Sienkiewicz’s novel Quo Vadis made its way into Italy at the end of the 19th century through the efforts of Neapolitan translator Federigo Verdinois. The first part of this paper outlines the history of the popularity of Quo Vadis by focusing on the operations of Milanese publishers that made the Polish novel part of their offer in a variety of ways (as translations, adaptations, reworkings, plagiarisms, etc.). Bibliometric methods are used to establish why so many publishing houses decided to publish Henryk Sienkiewicz’s Roman romance. The analysis of the bibliometric data of the published translations helped assess and describe the extent and the character of the popularity that the novel garnered among Milanese publishers. The second part of the paper relates the findings of a multi-method quantitative study of the same material. The number of word tokens was compared between the original and the translations. The lexical richness across the texts under study was compared by means of the moving average type-token ratio (MATTR). Sentence lengths were also compared, as was sentence length distribution as time series. Two different programmes (WCopyFind and Tracer) yielded very similar results on the degree of the similarity of five-word phrases in pairs of translations, which was determined in network analysis.