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.

Quo Vadis In Italian: A Stylometric Investigation Of Milanese Translations  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.

The present article aims to analyse the 20th-century Polish translations of Pietro Bembo’s work. Although Bembo was one of the main representatives of the Italian Renaissance and a prolific writer, of all his lyric poetry, only six songs from the collection Rime, a short poem from the dialogue Gli Asolani, and recently the Stanze have been fully translated. We owe most of the earlier translations to Julia Dickstein-Wieleżyńska, an important populariser of Italian culture in the interwar period. Two poems were translated by Maria Grossekowa, a poet, publicist, and feminist of the early 20th century. The small fragments of Bembo’s sonnets translated by Edward Porębowicz are also worthy of mention. The article focuses on the metric-formal and semantic-lexical analysis of DicksteinWieleżyńska’s versions and examines the techniques used by the translator. Dickstein-Wieleżyńska’s translations are quite equivalent semantically, and although she introduces some reduction or amplification, she does so without upsetting the semantic dominant. Moreover, it has been noted that, in her translations, Dickstein-Wieleżyńska often uses terms that refer to an idea of brightness, which also characterises her own poetic writing. Since Bembo is considered the pioneer of Petrarchism, the analysis of the Polish translations of Bembo’s poems is deepened through comparisons with some versions of Petrarch’s poems translated by Felicjan Faleński and published in 1881.

Wasted World or Sporco Mondo: Translating Informational Books for Children on Environmental Issues

The paper focuses on the Italian translations of two English informational books for children: Wasted World (2009) and Kids Fight Climate Change (2020), which deal with environmental issues. Informational books texts result from a complex dissemination process aimed at making specialised knowledge comprehensible to young readers. To achieve this purpose, informational books rely on various discursive popularising strategies, such as an array of explanations, and various methods for eliciting readers’ engagement, such as questions and irony. Indeed, they are part of what has come to be known as “edutainment,” in which education and entertainment are intertwined to create a “hybrid genre” (Buckingham and Scanlon, 2005). As the texts examined in the paper engage with ecology and environmental issues, they have a dual purpose: to inform and to raise awareness (ecoliteracy). Despite the importance of popularising texts, the translation of such products is still an underexplored field of research. The comparative analysis of the two English texts and their respective Italian translations centres on how global warming and climate change are described in the source and target texts. It examines how the popularising strategies are translated, given their importance in knowledge dissemination for children. The findings indicate that Italian translations, though retaining the combination of education and entertainment, tend to be more precise and more complex than the source texts. This is in line with the intercultural differences identified between Low Context (LC) cultures and High Context (HC) cultures.

Polish Children’s and Young Adult Literature on the Italian Publishing Market: The Case of the Nasza Księgarnia Publishing House

The history and publishing output of Nasza Księgarnia, Poland’s biggest publisher of children’s and young adult literature founded in 1921 and still operating, has been extensively researched by bibliologists and literature scholars over the last decades (Bylina, 1961; Aleksandrzak, 1972; Rogoż, 2009; Jamróz-Stolarska, 2014; Biernacka-Licznar, 2018a; Gawryluk, Lajborek & Korobkiewicz, 2021). However, the post-2000 productions of contemporary Polish writers and their translations into Italian have not attracted interest from Polish researchers yet. The paper aims to examine the publishing repertory of Nasza Księgarnia and identify the list of titles that made their way into the hands of the Italian reading public between 2012 and 2022. Based on the bibliometric method and interviews with the NK staff, the study generated reliable data and yielded a detailed account of the repertory released on the Italian publishing market in the last decade.

Forming Homo Sovieticus: The Impact of the Communist Ideology on the First Polish Translations of Gianni Rodari’s Poems

Gianni Rodari’s works first appeared in Poland when he was yet little known, if not rather unpopular, in his homeland. In the 1950s, Italian criticism ignored Rodari’s literary efforts as a ‘militant’ communist, his works only reached a narrow circle of readers, and it would take some years until he garnered popularity in his homeland. Meanwhile, what the Italians failed to appreciate appeared to be gaining an almost instant recognition in the USSR and the Eastern Bloc countries. As a member of the Italian Communist Party, the Editor-in-Chief of the children’s magazine Pioniere, and an eager supporter of communism, Rodari won favour with the authorities of the Polish People’s Republic. The earliest translations of Rodari’s poetry were published in the Polish press as early as in 1953. They were based on Russian translations by Samuil Marshak, whom the Polish authorities notably considered a perfect children’s writer. Both Russian and Polish versions of Rodari’s poemst tend to differ greatly from the original texts and to bear a heavy ideological imprint. My argument in this article seeks to answer the following questions: Which of Rodari’s poems were translated into Polish in the 1950s and by whom? How are they different from the Italian originals? What was their reception in Poland? How was Rodari portrayed in Poland at the time?