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.

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.