- Author:
Helena Bažec
- E-mail:
helena.bazec@fhs.upr.si
- Institution:
Università del Litorale
- Year of publication:
2018
- Source:
Show
- Pages:
11-33
- DOI Address:
https://doi.org/10.15804/IW.2018.09.01
- PDF:
iw/09_1/iw9101.pdf
Slovene A2/B1 Students’ Morphosyntax
The aim of this article is to make an error analysis based on a corpus consisting of 58 written tests in Italian on the vocational maturity exam of Slovene mother-tongue students at an A2/B1 level. The objective of the qualitative and quantitative analysis is to identify the most frequent errors in the field of morphosyntax, to find out the causes, and to compare them with the results that emerged from previous research studies. The qualitative analysis was carried out on the basis of a grid created after I had completed a contrastive study of Slovene and Italian and later adapted to the data that emerged from the corpus. The causes of errors are negative transfer from L1 and in a small percentage from other foreign languages such as English and Spanish, but also the generalisation strategy. Quantitatively, the most problematic part of speech is the article, a part of speech that Slovene does not have, followed by the erroneous form or use of verbs and prepositions. The other categories, which exceed 1% of all errors and are therefore included, are the agreement between constituents, word order, and errors related to different uses of the pronoun, adjective, noun, and adverb. This frequency of errors matches other similar research studies carried out in the past with the difference that other studies included students with different Slavic languages as the L1. This suggests that all Slavic learners have the same problems in Italian written production, therefore the first cause of morphosyntactic errors is the difference in the grammatical structure between L1 and L2.
- Author:
Silvia Corino Rovano
- E-mail:
silviamargherita.corinorovano@unito.it
- Institution:
Università degli Studi di Torino
- Year of publication:
2018
- Source:
Show
- Pages:
51-69
- DOI Address:
https://doi.org/10.15804/IW.2018.09.03
- PDF:
iw/09_1/iw9103.pdf
The “Golden Rules ” of GDLI: When Style Sheet Becomes Grammar
All dictionary editors have editorial rules. In fact, every collaborator must follow the style foreseen by the publication. To this end, every person who intends to participate in the editorial work is usually provided with a more or less consistent style sheet that contains the rules for writing the lemmas.
The editors of the GDLI were also provided with this type of material. Each collaborator, in fact, received a thin booklet entitled “Auree norme”, or “Golden rules”, that he had to follow. However, upon a careful examination of this precious file, the indications provided by the GDLI appear richer and more articulated than the usual set of editorial norms. In fact, they do not only contain a set of formal and typographical rules, but they have a much wider perspective: the editor is faced with a series of indications concerning spelling and grammar. The present research aims to identify the norms of grammatical interest and some elements of morphology and syntax that emerged during the discussion of the editing process of these dictionaries.
- Author:
Małgorzata Nowakowska
- E-mail:
malgorzata.nowakowska@up.krakow.pl
- Institution:
Università Pedagogica di Cracovia
- Year of publication:
2018
- Source:
Show
- Pages:
159-183
- DOI Address:
https://doi.org/10.15804/IW.2018.09.09
- PDF:
iw/09_1/iw9109.pdf
The Necessity to Distinguish Perfectivity from Resultativity in Order to Understand the Usage of Italian and Polish Tenses
In this article, following a critical examination of some Italian academic grammars, a new systematisation of the verbal systems of Italian and Polish is proposed.
In Italian, resultativity is a principal aspectual meaning, which can be seen in Italian verbal morphology. Compound tenses have grammaticalised the resultative meaning, whereas simple tenses have grammaticalised the lack of it, that is, they denote situations without any outcome. The author of the article proposes to separate this strongly grammaticalised opposition from the opposition of perfectivity vs imperfectivity, for which Italian does not have special grams. In this case, Italian uses two past tenses: the passato remoto with perfective meaning and the imperfetto with imperfective meaning. In Italian, it is not possible to express these opposite meanings in the future. This conception of the Italian verbal system is complicated by the coexistence of two past tenses used in narrating, i.e., the passato remoto and the passato prossimo. In fact, they are not duplicates because they belong to two complementary systems.
Unlike Italian, Polish has grammaticalised the opposition between perfectivity and imperfectivity, which means that it uses specialised grams conveying one of these two aspect meanings. This opposition is morphologically marked in future and past tenses and in non-finite forms of verbs. Besides, imperfective Polish verbs are used to indicate a past or future situation without giving information about its end or its continuation, a usage that is impossible with the Italian imperfetto tense. Polish, unlike Italian, does not have any grams conveying the result meaning; instead, it uses past-tense forms, as only this tense can indicate how the past action implies the lasting present state.
- Author:
Cinzia Citraro
- E-mail:
cinzia.citraro@unical.it
- Institution:
Università della Calabria
- ORCID:
https://orcid.org/0000-0003-0682-2032
- Year of publication:
2018
- Source:
Show
- Pages:
81-92
- DOI Address:
https://doi.org/10.15804/IW.2018.09.17
- PDF:
iw/09_2/iw9204.pdf
Prepositional chaos: error analysis and learning strategies
The use of prepositions is difficult to learn. To examine this fact, mistakes in the usage of prepositions were collected from 108 assignments completed by Italian secondary-school students. In this article, these errors are listed and several causes for them have been hypothesised: mistakes due to dialectal interference (type 1; a, b); errors in polyrhematic units (type 2; c, d, e); mistakes due to paradigmatic interference (type 3; f, g, h, i, l); errors due to loss of syntactic orientation (type 4; m, n, o). Following this, teaching strategies based on mistakes are proposed. Finally, an in-depth review of recent grammars and dictionaries is carried out in order to verify how the sections related to prepositions are structured and if the new cognitivist models have been accepted within these didactic instruments.
- Author:
Elżbieta Jamrozik
- E-mail:
e.jamrozik@uw.edu.pl
- Institution:
Uniwersytet Warszawski
- ORCID:
https://orcid.org/0000-0003-1614-0908
- Year of publication:
2018
- Source:
Show
- Pages:
93-117
- DOI Address:
https://doi.org/10.15804/IW.2018.09.18
- PDF:
iw/09_2/iw9205.pdf
The evolution of grammatical terminology in course books of the Italian language for Poles (17th–19th centuries)
The subject of research is that of changes in grammatical terminology that can be observed on the basis of four course books of Italian language for Poles published between 1675 and 1869. The first of them is marked by the Latin terminology that manifests in the adaptation of Latin terms as well as in the direct translation of their basic meaning into Polish. Moreover, the instability of terminology results in the co-occurrence of various forms of the Polish term or in the co-occurrence of Polish and Latin terms. The other two course books by anonymous authors, which seem to be adaptations of French course books, do not include Latin terminology, whereas names for word classes are, with a few exceptions, consistent with the Polish nomenclature devised by the Commission of National Education in the Enlightenment. In comparison to the previous course books, the last one involved in this research is more modern with regards to solutions that are typical for articles and other categories that are characteristic of Romance languages.
- Author:
Sebastiano Scarpel
- E-mail:
sebastiano.scarpel@up.krakow.pl
- Institution:
Uniwersytet Pedagogiczny w Krakowie
- ORCID:
https://orcid.org/0000-0002-1941-2879
- Year of publication:
2018
- Source:
Show
- Pages:
239-253
- DOI Address:
https://doi.org/10.15804/IW.2018.09.25
- PDF:
iw/09_2/iw9212.pdf
Teaching the Italian trapassato prossimo tense to Polish native speakers
The Italian pluperfect (trapassato prossimo) differs from other past tenses due to the fact that it implies a point of reference situated in the past. Although it is frequently used in both written and spoken language, little space is devoted to this tense in textbooks of Italian for foreigners. This can be explained by taking into consideration the following two factors: on the one hand, the Italian pluperfect usually can be substituted by other tenses (like the present perfect, passato prossimo, and preterite, passato remoto); on the other hand, the choice of the speaker to use this tense is often difficult to explain. In other words, the abovementioned point of reference is sometimes difficult to locate. A full comprehension of the Italian pluperfect can be problematic for a Polish speaker, as contemporary Polish does not have tenses with similar functions. The aim of this paper is to reflect on the teaching of the Italian pluperfect to Polish students, highlighting some linguistic issues that should be considered by the teacher.
- Author:
Ruska Ivanovska-Naskova
- E-mail:
Univerzitet “Sv. Kiril i Metodij” - Skopje
- Institution:
rivanovska@flf.ukim.edu.mk
- ORCID:
https://orcid.org/0000-0002-9819-6851
- Year of publication:
2019
- Source:
Show
- Pages:
59-76
- DOI Address:
https://doi.org/10.15804/IW.2019.10.1.3
- PDF:
iw/10_1/iw10103.pdf
Contrastive Italian-Macedonian studies: recent advances and future perspectives
The paper aims to present contrastive Italian-Macedonian studies, giving a general overview of the development of these studies, with particular attention to the context in which the first studies between these two languages appeared. A corpus of 60 studies published in the last two decades is analysed in the second part of the paper. The classification of the studies based on the topics covered reveals a prevalence of morphosyntactic, semantic, and translation studies. Contrastive studies related to teaching Italian as a foreign language and studies that introduce other topics are also present in the corpus. The final part of the paper reflects upon the future of this type of contrastive study, especially in light of the recent changes related to the interest in studying Italian in Macedonia.
- Author:
Agnieszka Latos
- E-mail:
alatos@swps.edu.pl
- Institution:
Uniwersytet Humanistycznospołeczny SWPS
- ORCID:
https://orcid.org/0000-0002-2549-3839
- Author:
Aleksandra Pronińska
- E-mail:
Uniwersytet Pedagogiczny w Krakowie
- Institution:
aleksandra.proninska@up.krakow.pl
- ORCID:
https://orcid.org/0000-0001-5132-2059
- Year of publication:
2019
- Source:
Show
- Pages:
111-131
- DOI Address:
https://doi.org/10.15804/IW.2019.10.1.5
- PDF:
iw/10_1/iw10105.pdf
The nominal systems of Italian and Polish in comparison: some remarks on gender and case as grammatical categories
The present study features a description and comparison of the Italian and Polish nominal systems. Our tertium comparationis are two grammatical categories: gender and case. Gender is morpho-syntactically coded in both languages; case, is morphologically coded only in Polish, while in Italian it is predominantly expressed by the use of prepositions. Focusing on the noun class, we contrastively examine the ways and means used to express the two grammatical meanings. In particular, we compare grammatical meanings expressed by morphological and syntactic cues. As a multifaceted category, grammatical gender classifies Italian and Polish nouns and co-regulates the morpho-syntactic agreement between sentence constituents (controller-target relation), contributing to the decoding of an internal text structure. The morphological case variation of Polish nouns (inflection) is often reinforced by syntactical markers; thus, case coding in Polish occurs both in synthetic and analytic ways. In contrast, Italian uses only analytic means to mark the grammatical meaning of case. The two linguistic systems under examination exhibit a similar formal organisation and expressive cues but apply them in different proportions.
- Author:
Małgorzata Nowakowska
- E-mail:
malgorzata.nowakowska@up.krakow.pl
- Institution:
Uniwersytet Pedagogiczny w Krakowie
- ORCID:
https://orcid.org/0000-0003-4538-6376
- Year of publication:
2019
- Source:
Show
- Pages:
155-177
- DOI Address:
https://doi.org/10.15804/IW.2019.10.1.7
- PDF:
iw/10_1/iw10107.pdf
Polish translations of the Italian verbal construction stare per + infinitive
The Italian verbal construction stare per + infinitive expresses the prospective aspect. This aspectual meaning can be defined in terms of Reichenbach’s theory (1947), which makes use of three points: E (the point of the event), S (the point of speech), and R (the point of reference). The prospective meaning appears when R precedes E and when the position of S is not important. The author of the article examines the possible ways of translating the Italian construction stare per + infinitive into Polish. Unlike Italian, this Slavic language does not have special grams that convey the prospective meaning. Amongst the possible Polish translations, the construction <mieć (‘have’) + infinitive> seems to express best the prospective meaning of the Italian stare per + infinitive. Still, this Polish construction has two other readings: a modal one and an evidential one.
- Author:
Ivica Peša Matracki
- E-mail:
ipesa@ffzg.hr
- Institution:
Sveučilište u zagrebu
- ORCID:
https://orcid.org/0000-0002-1292-3959
- Year of publication:
2019
- Source:
Show
- Pages:
179-205
- DOI Address:
https://doi.org/10.15804/IW.2019.10.1.8
- PDF:
iw/10_1/iw10108.pdf
Pragmatic aspects of evidentials in Italian and Croatian
Evidentials articulate the source of information on which a statement is based, which means that they also involve the speaker’s position towards the sentence content. In this paper, after defining the subject of the research and describing various typologies of evidential strategies, we analyse the pragmatic values of linguistic expressions that articulate the various degrees of a speaker’s involvement with regard to stated claims, which for their part represent speech acts used to endorse the veracity of a statement. Evidential strategies are frequently used to diminish responsibility for the veracity of claims, that is, they may serve as a means of distancing oneself from the sentence content, a discourse mechanism that the speaker may employ in order to avoid potential negative impacts that overly assertive claims might contain. In defining evidential strategies, we consult linguistic research as well as research on justification logic. The goal of this paper is to show that these terms can be adequately defined only by also taking into account the analysis of pragmatic impacts in a specific communicative and social situation.
- Author:
Mirjam Premrl
- E-mail:
mirjam.premrl@ff.uni-lj.si
- Institution:
Univerza v Ljubljani
- ORCID:
https://orcid.org/0000-0001-5891-0734
- Year of publication:
2019
- Source:
Show
- Pages:
207-232
- DOI Address:
https://doi.org/10.15804/IW.2019.10.1.9
- PDF:
iw/10_1/iw10109.pdf
Some correlation tendencies between the (in)definite form of Slovene adjectives and the (in)definiteness of nominal phrases from an Italian-Slovene contrastive perspective
This paper addresses some aspects of the expression of (in)definiteness in Slovene and Italian. While in Slovene, a language without a systemic use of articles, (in)definiteness can be considered only as a universal, extralinguistic, semantic/pragmatic category that is inferred implicitly from the context, in Italian it is fully encoded and is therefore also a grammatical/syntactic category. However, Slovene also displays a specific device in this respect: the definite and indefinite form of the adjective. This paper investigates some correlation tendencies between the definite adjectival form and the definiteness of the noun phrase in which the adjective acts as an attribute (and vice versa, the correlation between the indefinite form of the adjective and the indefiniteness of the respective noun phrase). The contrastive study is based on a corpus of Italian and Slovene texts, as well as their translations, in which Italian has a control function. The results speak in favour of the (in)definiteness correlation between the adjective and the noun phrase, although the indefinite form can also appear in definite noun phrases and the definite one in indefinite noun phrases.
- Author:
Roska Stojmenova Weber
- E-mail:
roska.stojmenova@unibas.ch
- Institution:
Universität Basel
- ORCID:
https://orcid.org/0000-0003-3535-0150
- Year of publication:
2019
- Source:
Show
- Pages:
261-278
- DOI Address:
https://doi.org/10.15804/IW.2019.10.1.11
- PDF:
iw/10_1/iw10111.pdf
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.
- Author:
Ziemowit Pazda
- Year of publication:
2014
- Source:
Show
- Pages:
17-70
- DOI Address:
https://doi.org/10.15804/IW.2014.05.01
- PDF:
iw/05/iw501.pdf
CHE COSA UNA GUIDA TURISTICA DI BRESLAVIA DICE AGLI ITALIANI A PROPOSITO DEI LORO CONNAZIONALI?
WHAT DOES A WROCŁAW CITY GUIDE TELL ITALIAN TOURISTS ABOUT THEIR FELLOW COUNTRYMEN?
The author describes the standard tourist itinerary across the city of Wrocław, especially the sites that concern the Italian presence in Wrocław or the merits of the Italian people regarding the region and its capital (artists, architects, exponents of the Church, soldiers, immigrants, etc.). He expresses the opinion that knowledge about elements of history associated with those of the same origins as the tourist group may help guides to interest and involve the group more and to improve the quality of their work. He briefly describes the preparation of the guides for their work and their sources of information, and presents the necessity of choice and selection of the material, depending on the current target audience.
- Author:
Katarzyna Biernacka-Licznar
- Institution:
Uniwersytet Wrocławski
- Year of publication:
2013
- Source:
Show
- Pages:
9-26
- DOI Address:
https://doi.org/10.15804/IW.2013.04.01
- PDF:
iw/04/iw401.pdf
Autobiographical narrative written by the students of the Faculty of Philology of the University of Wroclaw
The aim of the article is to show the possibility of using the idea of autobiographical narrative in the process of learning a foreign language. The article is composed of two parts, the former presenting the theoretical background of autobiographical narratives in the light of latest glottodidactic literature, the latter presenting the results of the author’s autobiographical narrative research conducted in the year 2012 amongst the students of Classical and Mediterranean Philologies of Wroclaw University (Institute of Classical Studies). The writing of this article was inspired by the published work of Dorota Werbinska22 and her study conducted amongst the students of English Philology as well as the students of non-philological fields of study like managerial studies and elementary education with English. The main objective of the article is to show the possibility of using the autobiographical study in the more effective process of teaching foreign languages.
- Author:
Emanuela Cotroneo
- Institution:
Università degli Studi di Genova
- Year of publication:
2013
- Source:
Show
- Pages:
37-57
- DOI Address:
https://doi.org/10.15804/IW.2013.04.03
- PDF:
iw/04/iw403.pdf
E-learning 2.0 to learn and teach Italian as a second language: social network, Facebook and language activities
Nowadays it would not be possible to plan an Italian language and culture class without considering the opportunity to use ICT. After the evolution from web to web 2.0 and from e-learning to e-learning 2.0, teachers approached a new concept of learning and teaching online. Web 2.0 tools, the social networks in particular, are considered a valuable resource for communicating, interacting and sharing linguistic and cultural contents, in formal and informal learning. Facebook, the most famous social network, becomes a virtual learning environment for students of Italian as a Second Language where posts, images, links and videos can be shared and used as L2 input. The Facebook page Lingua Italiana Per Stranieri (progetto LIPS), that we described it in this article, represents an example of a didactic use of this famous social network.
- Author:
Justyna Łukaszewicz
- Institution:
Uniwersytet Wrocławski
- Year of publication:
2013
- Source:
Show
- Pages:
141-158
- DOI Address:
https://doi.org/10.15804/IW.2013.04.09
- PDF:
iw/04/iw409.pdf
Italian Literature in Polish Schools: Pinocchio forever?
This article presents aspects of the way Pinocchio is known and understood in Poland, based on the availability and use of Italian literature in primary and secondary schools in that country since the Second World War. It focuses on the paratexts and contexts of the last two translations of Collodi’s masterpiece, particularly the translation by Jarosław Mikołajewski with illustrations by Roberto Innocenti, published in 2011.
- Author:
Ivica Peša Matracki
- E-mail:
ipesa@ffzg.hr
- Institution:
Sveučilištе u Zagrebu
- ORCID:
https://orcid.org/0000-0002-1292-3959
- Author:
Francesca Sammartino
- E-mail:
fsammartino@ffzg.hr
- Institution:
Sveučilištе u Zagrebu
- ORCID:
https://orcid.org/0009-0009-0985-3329
- Year of publication:
2023
- Source:
Show
- Pages:
97-119
- DOI Address:
https://doi.org/10.15804/IW.2023.14.1.05
- PDF:
iw/14_1/iw14105.pdf
Possessives in Molise Croatian
Riprendendo l’idea di Seiler e di Heine, il possesso è la relazione che si instaura tra due costituenti, possessore (possessor) e posseduto (possessum). Il possesso linguistico può essere di diverso tipo: permanente, fisico, inalienabile, astratto ecc. Sia in italiano che in croato il possesso è reso con aggettivi, pronomi e sintagmi preposizionali, ma il croato possiede il caso morfologico per esprimere il possesso. In italiano il possesso è reso con gli aggettivi e i pronomi possessivi (mia sorella) e il complemento di specificazione possessiva (la sorella di Mira). In croato esso è espresso ugualmente (moja sestra); con il dativo dei pronomi personali (sestra mi); con l’aggettivo possessivo (cr. posvojni pridjev) (Mirina sestra); con il doppio genitivo possessivo (sestra mojega oca); con il complemento di specificazione possessiva nelle varietà substandard (sestra od Mire). Il contributo indaga i mezzi per esprimere il possesso nel croato molisano, varietà štokavo-ikava in uso nell’isola linguistica della minoranza croata in Italia, in Molise, da una prospettiva contattologica e contrastiva e in base ai dati del corpus. Come a tutti i livelli linguistici, si stabilisce che anche nei mezzi per esprimere il possesso il croato molisano presenta usi e forme conservativi, croati, e innovativi, derivati dal contatto con l’italiano e la varietà abruzzese-molisana. Il possesso nel croato molisano si esprime con i pronomi possessivi (cr. posvojne zamjenice/pridjevi) (moja sestra); il dativo dei pronomi personali (sestra mi); l’aggettivo possessivo (cr. posvojni pridjev) (sestra Mirina); il complemento di specificazione possessiva (sestra do Mire); il doppio genitivo possessivo (sestra mojoga oca). Lo scopo della presente ricerca corpus-based è l’analisi dell’influsso dell’italiano e della varietà abruzzese-molisana sulla morfosintassi e sulla distribuzione dei possessivi nel croato molisano.
- Author:
Giulia Zangoli
- E-mail:
giulia.zangoli2@unibo.it
- Institution:
Università di Bologna
- ORCID:
https://orcid.org/0000-0002-1578-4915
- Year of publication:
2023
- Source:
Show
- Pages:
163-187
- DOI Address:
https://doi.org/10.15804/IW.2023.14.1.08
- PDF:
iw/14_1/iw14108.pdf
Russian Verbal Prefixes pri- and do-: On the Spatial Semantics and their Corresponding Italian Forms
In this paper, we analyse the spatial meaning of verbal prefixes pri- and do- and their semantic contribution to the lexicalisation of motion events. Our analysis is based primarily on the lexicographic description of these prefixes proposed in the Academic Grammar of the Russian Language (Švedova et al., 1980) and on the interpretation given to them in different works devoted to the study of the semantics of verbal prefixes in the Russian language. In different contributions, it is observed that the spatial meaning of the prefix pri- expresses the reaching of the goal of motion, including the crossing of its threshold (boundary-crossing). In contrast, the spatial semantics of the prefix do- is mostly described in relation to the progressive approaching to an endpoint along a spatial scale (boundary-reaching). In the course of the contrastive analysis, an attempt will be made to identify and describe possible Italian correspondences for Russian verbs of motion with prefixes pri- and do-. We also consider which semantic components of a motion event encoded in a Russian prefixed verb are expressed or omitted in the corresponding Italian constructions. The research has been conducted on the parallel Russian-Italian corpus, part of the National Corpus of the Russian Language (we consider just a few examples).
- Author:
Diana Vargolomova
- E-mail:
d.vargolomova@uni-sofia.bg
- Institution:
Sofijski Universitet “Sv. Kliment Ohridski”
- ORCID:
https://orcid.org/0000-0001-8507-5973
- Year of publication:
2023
- Source:
Show
- Pages:
51-69
- DOI Address:
https://doi.org/10.15804/IW.2023.14.2.03
- PDF:
iw/14_2/iw14203.pdf
Complexity of the System of Past Tenses: Comparison of Italian and Bulgarian
Comparative studies of complexity have recently provoked the growing interest of linguists. In this paper, we compare the grammatical structures for the expression of past actions in Italian and in Bulgarian, based on the theories of linguistic complexity. The linguistic structures’ complexity is generally examined from two main points of view: 1) absolute complexity and 2) user or relative complexity. The research on absolute complexity aims to measure linguistic structures with objective criteria, while the studies based on the second meaning of the term investigate the subjective perception of individuals speaking or studying one or more languages; this latter approach is related primarily to language teaching. Even if each individual study generally favours only one of the two perspectives, we believe the correlations between the degree of structural complexity and the difficulties for the user should be considered and measured. The proposed analysis, consequently, is based on the comparison between the grammatical structures for the expression of the past but also involves an empirical study on the translation work from Italian into Bulgarian. Contrastive work consists in the isolation and measurement of units, such as the number of tenses, modes, and rules in the two languages, and is based on the students’ translation practices in Italian philology at Sofia University St. Kliment Ohridski and the difficulties they experience when translating the past tenses.