1,721,051 research outputs found
The Author/Translator Interactional Process. A Case Study
No full textSee Naples and Kill (1988) is a lively and colourful novel by the con-temporary English writer, Gregory Dowling, translated into Italian in 2015.
Following the tradition of translation studies (Venuti 2000, Bass-nett 2002, Cronin 2006), this paper analyses the rewriting process of literary translation, considering in particular the fruitful but sometimes tense and even conflictual relationship between writer and translator.
The translation of the novel See Naples and Kill was an ongoing rewriting process entailing a constant dialogue between the writer and the translator. Therefore, the study aims at answering two main ques-tions: what happens if the rewriting process of translation is constant-ly questioned by the author? What happens if the author has a good mastery of the target language and s/he is her/himself a translator?
By exploring the relationship between translation and re-creation, the research focuses on the differences and similarities between the primary creation (source text) and the secondary creation (target text), and aims to verify in which way the dialogic encounter of two different personalities and cultures does not make them merge but, by retaining their own uniqueness, leads eventually to their mutually en-riching each other. A comparative analysis of the source text and the different drafts of the translated version accompanied by the author’s comments will shed light on the tense author-translator relationship in the specific case under investigation and how both actors handle this tension in order to create a new work resulting from the (dis)agreement of the two parties
Upper-class English in natural and audiovisual dialogue
Full text linkThis Ph.D. thesis deals with the language of the British upper class in natural face-to-face dialogue and how this language is rendered fictionally in audiovisuals. In this research, the definition of ‘upper class’ is used to refer to the British aristocracy, also defined in more modern terms as the élite group, which is distinguished by the other social classes by comparatively higher rates of cultural, social and economic capitals.
This topic was chosen because, while the so-called ‘working classes’ in Britain have traditionally received more attention from scholars, the upper class has rarely been the subject of particularised studies, probably because it is a smaller social group, which is characterised by a concrete difficulty of penetration for investigation purposes. Moreover, the élite sociolect has traditionally been identified with the standard language, and has consequently been excluded from sociolinguistic studies. One of the main objectives of this thesis is that of providing a complete linguistic overview of the language of the British upper class by demonstrating that standard language and upper-class language should not be assumed to be identical.
This thesis will be mostly descriptive, with the aim of reorganising the sparse information on the topic that is found in previous linguistic and sociocultural studies; these bibliographical contents will be discussed and expanded in the light of new evidence gathered from the qualitative analysis of some recorded audiovisual texts, building on the principles of Conversation Analysis and Sociophonetics. The use of computer-assisted tools will also be part of the process of the analysis. The research method adopted for this thesis can thus be considered as an empirical archival method, whose three major steps were the location, the inspection and the interpretation of the documentary sources.
In particular, after two chapters dedicated to the linguistic description, the diachronic evolution and the present-day internal variability of the upper-class sociolect, the second part of the thesis will deal with the analysis of the case studies: chapter 3 will explore the main aspects of the spontaneous aristocratic language of Queen Elizabeth, the Royal Family and a few other influential upper-class figures in British society, while chapter 4 will be devoted to the upper-class character in cinema and TV and to the linguistic analysis of some conversational scenes in the Netflix TV series The Crown (2016-present); a final chapter will close the discussion by focusing on the comparison between real and represented upper-class English through the analysis of a few public speeches by the Queen and other aristocratic figures and how these speeches were rendered in The Crown.
The results from this study, which combines the disciplines of sociolinguistics and dialectology applied to the audiovisual text, will hopefully open a new path in the study of the language of the élite group, which can still be considered as an under-researched topic in academia
My brilliant translator / La traduttrice geniale? Creativity in translating the Neapolitan background of Elena Ferrante’s L’amica geniale into English.
No full textThrough an analysis of the best-selling novel L’Amica geniale, written under the pseudonym of Elena Ferrante, in which Naples, its suburbs, its associated culture and its language are portrayed, this essay focuses on the cultural aspects of translation and on how the specific linguistic and cultural context expressed in the book have been rendered for the American audience in the translation by Ann Goldstein. The background of the novel and Ferrante’s specific and particular linguistic choices might be difficult to catch and to make clear to the reader of the target text as they often have no exact correspondence in the target language and imply a certain degree of creativity by the translator. Starting from some views on the role of the translator when facing a culture-bound text and from the possible translation strategies which can be adopted in rendering ‘culturemes’, in the present qualitative analysis the language and the culture-specific items of L’Amica geniale will be identified and categorized and their translation will be analyzed to answer the general research questions on how the representation of the Neapolitan culture/environment has been reproduced, on which strategies have been used and with which results and to what extent this translation can be seen as an act of creativity
“Logically, We Quite Agree with the IARC”: Negotiating Interpersonal Meaning in a Corpus of Scientific Texts
No full textThis chapter extends the scope of a previous study (Fusari 2017 and in press 2018) of the reception, by a range of scientific journals featured in the database Elsevier Science Direct, of a 2015 report (IARC 2015) in which the International Agency for Research on Cancer officially incorporated red meat in Group 2A carcinogens (probably carcinogenic to humans) and processed meat in Group 1 (carcinogenic to humans). For this study, we have built a 384,491 words corpus, fully POS-tagged, and partially parsed using a systemic functional grammatical formalism. While the previous stages in this project concentrated on ideational meaning, addressing the use of mass vs. countable nouns, nominalization, the experiential structure of the Noun Group, and patterns of Transitivity, this new step moves beyond representation (Glenn 2004; Gupta 2006; Stibbe 2014; Cook 2015), to explore interpersonal meaning. This area of meaning is less widely studied with corpus approaches, largely because of the greater difficulty, both technical and epistemological, of analysing Tenor with a corpus-assisted approach (Fuoli 2018). Our aim is to analyze how the roles of the various Participants (IARC, scientific community, general public) in the discursive construction of meat carcinogenicity are negotiated. To achieve this aim, we rely on the notions of Attitude, Engagement and stance, in terms of both Appraisal theory (Martin & White 2005) and interactional metadiscourse (Hyland 2005; 2017; Jiang & Hyland 2017). We concentrate specifically on attitudinal Values, Graduation, comment Adjuncts, modal verbs and personal pronouns. The results show that the scientific literature exemplified in this corpus does not aim to settle the meat/cancer controversy once and for all, but rather to “persuade readers [i.e. other members of the relevant discourse communities] of the scientific acceptability of the knowledge claims presented” (Allen, Qin & Lancaster 1994, p. 280). Therefore, the discursive construction of meat carcinogenicity should not be seen only in terms of relating objective facts and hard data about the levels of risk involved, but also in terms of “dialogism” (O’Hallaron, Palincsar & Schleppegrell 2015), which is equally - if not more - important to reach a shared interpretation (Fernández Polo 2018) of scientific facts
Going Beyond Counting First Authors in Author Co-citation Analysis
Full text linkThe present study examines one of the fundamental aspects of author co-citation analysis (ACA) - the way co-citation
counts are defined. Co-citation counting provides the data on which all subsequent statistical analyses and mappings
are based, and we compare ACA results based on two different types of co-citation counting - the traditional type that
only counts the first one among a cited work's authors on the one hand and a non-traditional type that takes into
account the first 5 authors of a cited work on the other hand. Results indicate that the picture produced through this non-traditional author co-citation counting contains more coherent author groups and is therefore considerably clearer. However, this picture represents fewer specialties in the research field being studied than that produced through the traditional first-author co-citation counting when the same number of top-ranked authors is selected and analyzed. Reasons for these effects are discussed
Think Aloud and Observational Learning: for an Interdisciplinary Approach to Translation Learning
No full textVariations on the Author
Full text link“Variations on the Author” discusses two of Eduardo Coutinho’s recent films (Um Dia na Vida, from 2010, and Últimas Conversas, posthumously released in 2015) and their contribution to the general question of documentary authorship. The director’s filmography is characterized by a consistent yet self-effacing form of authorial self-inscription: Coutinho often features as an interviewer that rather than express opinions propels discourses; an interviewer that is good at listening. This mode of self-inscription characterizes him as an author who is not expressive but who is nonetheless markedly present on the screen. In Um Dia na Vida, however, Coutinho is completely absent form the image, while Últimas Conversas, on the contrary, includes a confessional prologue that moves the director from the margins to the center of his films. This article examines the ways in which these works stand out in the filmography of a director who offers new insights into the notion of cinematic authorship
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