Lingua e traduzione inglese II, Slide di Lingua Inglese

Scarica Lingua e traduzione inglese II e più Slide in PDF di Lingua Inglese solo su Docsity! (Week 1) Jakobson's theory of translation The importance of translation in a global society The importance of translation in a global society In our global world, translation becomes a priority, at more than one level. Certainly, it becomes paramount from a social point of view, since our global world, marked through and through by important migratory flows, exchanges between different cultures and communities, etc., increasingly requires translators. Thus, approaching translation, also in specialized domains, as a form of cultural mediation, can help people approach the multicultural societies we live in with adequate and effective tools. From this perspective, translation is therefore posited as a form of intercultural communication and many of the notions originally elaborated within language studies (ESP studies in particular) can (and should) be applied to the study of translation too. Indeed, the various forms of translation on which this Module focuses become essential to understand many of the nuances that determine the way different cultures use language in specialized contexts. In fact, it is only by becoming aware of certain aspects of language use that we can hope to use and translate language appropriately. The kind of interdisciplinary approach adopted during this course is actually essential in translation, in so far as the issues this process raises are many and diverse, and should therefore be tackled from different critical perspectives. If this is so, it is because reality itself is increasingly composite and complex, providing us with a multitude of (spoken and written) texts belonging to different genres and sub- genres, and aiming at performing different functions. Thus, as we shall explore in this Introductory Module, specialized translation appears fundamental not only at an academic/scholarly level but, because of the intrusion of specialized discourse in society, also at the level of everyday life. Becoming aware of the mechanisms on which specialized languages rely and being able to translate them therefore becomes essential for every member of society, especially (it goes without saying) for those people who would like to make a career in the field of translation. Just like any other users of language, translators must de-code every aspect of a message (both linguistic and pragmatic) in order to re-code them into a different language, or a different sign system, where they will have to try and reproduce the same (linguistic, pragmatic etc.) elements, in order to obtain the same effect on their receivers. Jakobson's theory of translation The materials used and the arguments developed in the various Units of this Module hinge on the tripartition elaborated by Roman Jakobson in the essay ‘Linguistic aspects of translation’ (1959), where the scholar, as is well known, identifies three main types of translation: 1. Translation proper or interlingual translation - when the translator interprets the linguistic signs of one language through the signs of another language; 2. Reformulation/re-verbalisation or intralingual translation - that is to say when the translator interprets linguistic signs of a language through different signs of the same language; and 3. Transmutation or intersemiotic translation - namely, when the translator interprets the signs of a certain system (for example, verbal language) through the signs of a different system (using for instance non-linguistic signs). Despite the fact that Jakobson published his article years ago, and despite some criticisms to his work which will be discussed in more detail below, the different forms of translation he identifies appear to be extremely valid today Naturally, the notion theorized by Jakobson himself as to the impossibility of a complete equivalence between two texts appears throughout fundamental, also when we deal with specialized discourse. In the light of Jakobson's theory - and as emphasized by various scholars throughout the twentieth and twenty-first centuries - it appears evident that translation (be it interlingual, intersemiotic or intralingual) is always a product of the target culture and its communities of receivers. It therefore becomes evident that the notion of culture, identified on the basis of the community it expresses, which it simultaneously defines, should be understood in the ethnographic sense of the word, whereby it becomes a useful concept to differentiate the use of language that, for instance, adult vs young, or expert vs lay speakers make, an aspect particularly relevant in the present discussion, focused on specialized languages. The (social) usefulness of intralingual and intersemiotic translation Certainly, the academic and scholarly interest in the exploitation of intralingual and intersemiotic translation, is fairly recent, especially in terms of comics and graphic art in general. It is true that lately we have witnessed various publications on the potentials of comics (see Information Comics, by Jüngst, 2010 among others), and the beneficial repercussions of using images (Mannan 2005; Clark and Lyons 2004) and graphic Yet, old media too, such as printed comics or graphic novels, influenced as they are by these forms of remediation, can frequently be the object of a rebound effect and can equally become more interactive, offering the public the opportunity to participate more actively. As such, they promote, albeit incidentally, a process of “learning by doing” (Dewey 1938), which has long since been acknowledged as fostering a more authentic and profound education (Hackathorn et al. 2011; Yuan et al. 2018). This is, for example, the case of the graphic novel The Death Ray (2004), where readers are confronted with different endings of the story, or products such as Meanwhile: Pick any Path, a graphic novel published in the ‘Choose Your Own Adventure’ style in 2010, which offers readers 3,856 story possibilities, enabling receivers to actively participate in the development of the story, thereby enhancing their incidental learning potentials, and which, through the remediation process described above, has had a fundamental influence on the development of hypertext fiction, whereby readers, by clicking on different links, are provided with a new context. Thus, as suggested below, the ‘multiple ending’ stratagem could be readily exploited in ‘entertaining’, ‘educational’ and ‘edutaining’ graphic products which have at their core also the use of specialized languages, so as to to engage readers more actively, thereby facilitating the comprehension and the assimilation of specific notions. Actually, the definitions of “incidental learning” elaborated by Kerka (2000) and Restrepo Ramos (2015) among others, while referring mainly to second language acquisition, can be adapted to the present discussion, on the premise that specialized languages can in fact be identified as a language different from ordinary and plain English. According to Kerka (2000: 3), for example: Incidental learning is unintentional or unplanned learning that results from other activities. It occurs often […] in many ways: through observation, repetition, social interaction, and problem solving (Cahoon, 1995; Rogers, 1997); from implicit meanings in classroom or workplace policies or expectations (Leroux and Lafleur, 1995) […] This ‘natural’ way of learning (Rogers, 1997) has characteristics of what is considered most effective in formal learning situations: it is situated, contextual, and social. Incidental learning therefore encourages not only a higher degree of ‘competence’ – having for example positive effects on vocabulary and grammar learning through reading (Jenkins et al. 1984; Paribakht and Wesche 1999; Ponniah 2011) – but also brings about a change in the individual’s attitudes, a growth in interpersonal skills, and an enhanced self-confidence and self-awareness (Mealman 1993; Ross-Gordon and Dowling 1995; McFerrin 1999). The notion of Intralingual Translation Intralingual translation can be described as a language-internal practice, whereby a source text is translated into a target text which, while working within the same language, distinguishes itself according to the target it addresses and the functions it is supposed to perform. Through intralingual translation, a source text is rendered into a target text which, while working within the same language, distinguishes itself on the basis of the target it addresses and the functions it is supposed to perform. As scholars have pointed out (see for instance Gottlieb: 2005, 2008), intralingual translation therefore might be triggered by - the need to change the register of a text or by - the necessity to translate a text across the diglossic spectrum (Petrilli: 2003), whereby a dialect is translated into a different one, as in the case of the rewritings of British novels for the North American market analyzed for instance by Pillière (2010 - you can read the article here). Although the phenomena of intralingual translation and, as Lefevere (1992) would call it, rewriting, are well established since ancient times, the practice has gained academic interest only quite recently. Indeed, as Korning Zethsen notes, we need much more empirically-based research to provide a thorough and comprehensive description of intralingual translation and of the similarities and differences between intralingual and interlingual translation (2009: 810). As previously mentioned, although Jakobson would address this type of issue in terms of intralingual translation, his theorization has been occasionally criticized, leading to the exclusion of the strategies on which some of the following Units focus from a definition of translation. According to the scholars arguing in favour of this position, in fact, the category of ‘translation’ should be confined to interlingual practices only (Newmark 1991: 69; Mossop 1998: 252; Schubert 2005: 126). As Derrida points out (1985: 173), to an extent the privileged status assigned to interlingual translation was implicit in the way Jakobson himself defined the three forms of translation. Indeed, as the French scholar emphasizes, the concepts of intralingual and intersemiotic translation are defined by Jakobson via a process of rewording, whereby the author (2012: 126-127) uses amplifications and additions to define the notions themselves: “intralingual translation or rewording” and “intersemiotic translation or transmutation”. On the contrary, interlingual translation is defined as “translation proper” (ibidem), thus adopting a procedure of repetition. The adjective selected equally seems to reinforce the perception of interlingual translation as ‘actual translation’, whereas the definitions of intralingual and intersemiotic as different. As critical discourse analysts were to bring to the fore, the procedures adopted by Jakobson might well be defined not simply as ‘rewording’ but more fundamentally as ‘overwording’, which Fairclough (2014) includes in his discussion of the empirical values that words assume in a text, emphasizing how – by identifying someone or something by using a larger number of words – this procedure draws attention to the subject itself, which is consequently characterized as different and deviant. As a result of the difference in treatment Jakobson reserved to the three categories of translation, scholars such as Hermans (1995: 5-18) argued for an exclusion of intralingual and intersemiotic strategies from a definition of translation, at least in its 'institutional' (as opposed to purely 'academic') meaning. However, Jakobson’s definition clearly assigns intralingual and intersemiotic processes to the category of translation, and his original explicitation of the object of study does not, in reality, deny their status. Thus, as maintained by various scholars such as Canepari (in print), Göpferich (2004, 2007), Korning Zethsen (2007, 2009), Vaerenbergh (2003), Schmid (2008, 2012), Maaß et al. (2014) and others - see for example: Gentzler (2001); Petrilli and Ponzio (2012); Tomaszkiewicz (2005); Torop (2000, 2002) - Jakobson’s taxonomy and the relevance of intralingual and intersemiotic translation in Translation Studies is not only acceptable, but a necessary step, beneficial to the critical discussion of many products that should be considered actual translations. Indeed, the notions of language and culture on which the restrictive definitions of translation seen above rest appear to dismiss wider-scope concepts of ‘culture’ and ‘language’ informed by disciplines such as the ethnography of speaking (whose identification of cultural speech communities falls outside a stringent definition based on the sole notion of ‘national language’), dialectology (which identifies different dialects – including geographical, temporal and social dialects – which, while developing within the same ‘national language’, might be characterized by a notable degree of incomprehensibility), register studies (which focus on varieties of language that, while acting within the same national language, might equally prove unintelligible and be perceived as ‘different languages’ altogether), etc. In all the instances contemplated above, speakers are confronted with language varieties which, while belonging to the same ‘national language’, might need translating into more standard forms in order to be made comprehensible, thereby requiring an intralingual effort. As Korning Zethsen and Hill-Madsen (2016: 693) claim, and as demonstrated in a previous work (Canepari 2022): strategies and tools, but also different functions and, as a result, diverse perlocutionary effects. In this course, the notion of translation is therefore regarded as inclusive, and is obviously informed by disciplines such as translinguistics, as well as both semiotic and linguistic theories of inter/transtextuality and its modalities (adaptation, appropriation, parody, etc.). In particular, this course advocates a semiotic notion of translation, according to which the latter entails a “transition from one semiotic system (source language) to another (target language)” (Kourdis 2015: 1). This clearly implies that the categories of translation could actually be reduced to two: - intrasemiotic (indicating translations within the same semiotic system, and which could therefore be applied to both inter- and intralingual translation) and - intersemiotic (which on the contrary implies a change of semiotic system). In actual fact, in general terms, it is possible, as Hallet maintains (2002, 2012), to speak of “semiotic translation”. According to the scholar, this notion becomes extremely relevant in all those learning environments where a new, specialized language is used to address domain-specific contents. In these contexts (which clearly are focused upon in this course), teachers should in fact translate very specific disciplinary ways of saying and expressing notions and concepts into the learners’ ordinary language, in order to help them achieve a full comprehension and encourage them to integrate this specific knowledge into their life experience and its language. Thus, according to the scholar (Hallet 2009: 2), teachers should train the learners to integrate scientific concepts into their everyday language and develop methodological tools and design classroom activities that initiate semiotic translation processes As he states (ibidem), Teachers of content subjects tend to regard the languages of their discipline as the ‘natural’ language of the subject they teach. By contrast, to the learners these disciplinary languages […] are often utterly strange and foreign; learners have to familiarize themselves with them and acquire them – very much in the manner of a foreign language. Implementing the notion of semiotic translation in teacher training therefore also introduces a reflexive dimension into teacher development, creating an awareness of the languages one uses and the disciplinary cultures from which they originate. This is the reason why he considers translation skills fundamental. However, although the author terms this procedure as ‘semiotic translation’ it is evident that this approach should be identified, more specifically, as intralinguistic (and, on occasions, intersemiotic) translation. Thus, on the one hand, ESP teachers need to translate intralingually subject-specific language into ordinary language. On the other, if they are aiming to ‘translate’ the language of a specific discipline into a language that learners can recognize as theirs, they will need to select specific materials and teaching tools. In this sense, it is indisputable that multimodal materials and the adoption of a multimodal and multimedia approach could be extremely advantageous. Certainly, as Hanks (2014: 21) suggests, intralingual translation is part of language itself. Thus, because this type of translation is “a design feature of language” and plays “a crucial role in the social life of any language” (ivi: 28), it can become an important ally in many different environments. In order to avoid any ambiguity as to the terminology adopted, however, this course will essentially resort to the one introduced by Jakobson in order to identify intrasemiotic processes of intralingual translation and intersemiotic procedures. Thus, the description of translation as a category offered by Korning Zethsen (2007: 299) in her discussion of the delimitation of the scientific field of Translation Studies, appears particularly interesting (to appreciate the place of intralingual translation within Translation Studies, read Korning Zethsen's article here). The notions put forward, and the analyses conducted, within the field of intrasemiotic translation by Graham (2000), Simon (2000), Sim (2001), Grainge (2002), Sanders (2006) among others, therefore form a background to the study of the strategies at the translators’ disposal, and should be clearly taken into account when establishing the different functions the target text should perform within the target culture and the effects it is supposed to have on target receivers. Clearly, the fact that the notions of intralingual and intersemiotic translation always rest on the concept of intertextuality obliges translators to evaluate the changes that the various elements of the source texts might undergo during the translation process according to the type of intertextual relationship the final product entertains with the source, which is in its turn determined by the ideal target receiver and the illocutionary and perlocutionary acts the target text aims at performing. Certainly, within the specific field under study, due to its general features (Gotti 2005), the compact and dense sentences of specialized discourse (be it scientific, legal or other), make it often difficult for students or the general public to decode them. Thus, by adopting intralingual strategies, the message can be made more reader- friendly and more accessible. This, as analyzed in this course, holds for all specialized languages, so that in the transposition from any source text to a target text, the translator will opt either for additions and amplifications (intended to make the source more understandable) or omissions and condensations (aimed at balancing the amount of details and the general information load provided), as well as substitutions (often defined by the selection of a different register). Furthermore, since in the case of the products analyzed here these intralingual procedures work in synergy and interact with intersemiotic strategies (whereby some of the verbal elements of the source text are likely to be substituted or amplified not only intralingually but also intersemiotically, exploiting illustrations, drawings, photographs and other visual elements), the resulting target texts address different learning styles, thus making specialized discourse more accessible (and often more memorizable) for a variety of receivers. Remediating and remediatizing texts Intersemiotic translation and the exploitation of multimodality and multimediality, which the new technologies put at the translator’s disposal (especially in terms of digitalized and digital materials), represent an incredibly powerful tool which allows the creation of more accessible, and yet equivalent, products, provided that the notion of equivalence needs to be remodulated. Indeed, the notion of equivalence should be understood as the result of a negotiation between the ‘differences’ and the ‘similarities’ between source and target text, and should be thus based not only on the presence of an invariant core, but, as Tymoczo suggests (2007), on the existence of a cluster of resemblances. The notion of 'fidelity' often central in interlingual translation therefore needs to be adapted and adjusted to the new needs of the translation processes under discussion here. Naturally, even though an intralingual translation might not always resort to intersemiotic strategies, intersemiotic translation, as suggested above, most of the times relies on intralingual translation strategies. Thus, because of the synergy and interaction of these forms of translation, the resulting target texts address different learning styles, thereby making specialized discourse more accessible (and often more memorizable) for a variety of receivers. Clearly, the strategies and procedures mentioned above can work within the field of intersemiotic translation too, so that the final products will be marked by both intralingual and intersemiotic translation processes, with all the consequences this entails. For instance, as analyzed infra, some of the verbal elements of the source text are likely to be substituted or amplified not only intralingually but intersemiotically as well, exploiting illustrations, drawings, photographs and other visual elements, and rendered more accessible through the application of specific translation strategies and procedures, the introduction of new metaphors and the exploitation of multi-modality/mediality. As a matter of fact, as Lakoff and Johnson suggest (1980b), our conceptual system is fundamentally metaphorical, since metaphors provide a partial understanding of one which he called ‘coloremes’, while Fresnault-Dervelle (1972) and others developed more narratological approaches centred on narrative functions. More recently, scholars such as Magnussen (2000) and Cohn (2007, 2010) have turned to C.S. Peirce’s semiotics (1931) to describe the patterns of graphic expression, whereas authors such as McCloud (1993, 2000), Groensteen (1999, 2005), Barbieri (2009, 2017), Frezza (2018), Mikkonen (2019) and Davies (2019) among others have approached comics and graphic novels as semiotic objects. Analogously, in recent years, interest in the interlingual translation of comics (see for instance Zanettin, 2008; Celotti, 2008), and in their educational value (see for example Cheesman, 2006; Mallia, 2007; Recine, 2013; Yıldırım, 2013) has equally developed. Yet, comics are rarely approached in terms of intersemiotic and intralingual translation. Despite this, it is possible to adopt some of the terminology and notions that were originally coined to discuss specific forms of intersemiotic translation (i.e., cinematographic adaptations) and adjust it to the current study. This procedure is also justified by the fact that graphic art – comics in particular – are characterized by various elements that enable its products to come closer to audiovisuals, thereby suggesting a dynamic depiction of scenes. For instance, even though images, in comics, are static, the presence of the visual and its interaction with verbal communication render their language context-bound, in the same way as speech is (Halliday, 1985). Not only this, but the dialogues contained in speech and thought balloons, by being linked to the characters’ mouths, evoke real dialogue and the language they exhibit is often characterized by such features as low lexical density, typical of spoken language (ibidem), while the form and trait of the balloons allow the introduction, in the written text, of prosodic elements typical of speech like pitch, pace, etc. Furthermore, the layout of the balloons mimics the turn-taking system that determines the way actual conversations are organized, often managing to render also instances of overlaps and interruptions. In addition, the sequentiality of the framed images typical of comics evokes actual motion and the passing of time, whereas the presence of onomatopoeia creates the illusion of an actual soundtrack. Naturally, in graphic art and comics, what is missing is the actual voice, which, while being fictional in audiovisual products (in that what viewers are confronted with is not actually natural, spoken language, but a language which was written in order to be recited), it nonetheless entails many of the features characteristic of actual spoken language, certainly resulting much closer to orality than its written reproduction in written texts such as comics and graphic novels. Indeed, as Kress maintains, ‘the voice as signifier can carry meanings which cannot […] be translated into the written medium’ (1986: 402). Nevertheless, as the following Units clarify, intralingual procedures regularly exploited in popular audiovisual products, such as explicitation, together with some of the strategies typical of spoken language, like re-lexicalization (see for instance Tannen, 1989; McCarthy and Carter, 1994) also characterize graphic products. Furthermore, all those elements that are typical of spoken communication, whether in real life or in filmic representations (namely, body language, gaze behaviour, distance, etc.), are equally depicted in comic art, and offer important clues to receivers as to the interpretation of the message with which they are confronted. Of course, the different functions performed by the actual intonation patterns exploited on screen (which mimic real life occurrences of speech in interaction) can be reproduced only partially in written texts. However, through the exploitation of typographical devices such as the font selected, the size of the characters used, or the outlines of the speech balloons and, as discussed below, the emblems and other elements typical of visual language, verbal language can assume, also in graphic products, an attitudinal function (O’ Connor and Arnold, 1973), convey the affective meaning described by Brazil (1985) and perform the grammatical and informative functions which, as we shall see, determine, both on screen and on the written page, the way in which the various characters represented interact. Naturally, since the intonation patterns reproduced are modulated on both the needs of the fictional product and the needs of the extra-textual receiver, the latter will be called upon to interpret them in order to disambiguate the meaning of the message, interpret the level of hedging these patterns express, identify the central information, differentiate the theme from the rheme and, through the decoding of the combinations of the various tonic groups, understand whether the fictional speaker is creating a contrast, an equivalence or is simply adding information. As a matter of fact, as Brazil, Coulthard and Johns argue (1980), the choice of a particular tone or pattern does not depend on the linguistic features of the message, but rather on the speaker’s assessment of the relationship between the message and the audience, and it is therefore the audience (which coincides, on the one hand, with the fictitious interlocutors represented on screen or on page and, on the other, with the final audience the product in question addresses) that determines the choice of the intonation pattern adopted. As mentioned supra, this decodification process is clearly helped by the presence of the visual. Indeed, as Ornella Piazza (2004) suggests in relation to cinematographic adaptations, when she argues that in cinema the word acquires an authentic meaning only in relation to the physical gesture that accompanies it, so both audiovisual and graphic products rely on the synergy existing among the various languages (verbal and otherwise) involved in the communication. Thus, the reproduction of the prosodic aspects of verbal language, together with the paralinguistic, indexical and kinesic elements that the presence of a visual makes available, all of which are determined by that ‘visual grammar’ described by Kress and van Leeuwen (1998), become fundamental and integral parts of the meaning of the message. Moreover, just as the language typical of audiovisual products often differs from the language found in written source texts on which they are based in terms of function, so the language exploited in graphic products is designed to achieve different goals and is characterized by dissimilar purposes. Indeed, whereas the spoken language of audiovisual products often has an interpersonal function as well (Hallyday, 1985b), both within the world of the fictional product itself and in relation to the extra-textual receiver, normally – and despite the many rhetorical strategies which, as discussed infra, authors often exploit so as to obtain consensus – written texts are typified by an informative function (Halliday, 1985a). Similarly to what happens in audiovisual goods, the verbal language of graphic products often performs an interpersonal function too, engaging receivers at a personal level, while simultaneously offering information. For this reason, graphic and comic art can be placed at an intersection between printed texts and screen products, to the extent that in both instances intersemiotic translation generally posits itself as an effort of synthesis. If this is so, it is not only because graphic products are constrained by issues of space similar to the time issues typical of filmic adaptations, whereby the final product cannot exceed a certain number of pages (in the case of graphic novels or comics) or hours (as with films or television products). As a result, just as in audiovisual goods, also in graphic products, some of the verbal language can be intersemiotically translated and represented in images, thus achieving condensation and synthesis. Yet, as discussed below, in the instances analyzed here, the contrary is actually often true, in that, in order to make specific notions fully comprehensible, the translator might adopt expansion and addition procedures, inserting supplementary intersemiotic representations which, inevitably, cover more space in terms of the number of pages. This specific feature, then, actually represents a rather evident difference between filmic and graphic intersemiotic translation, in that, whereas original excerpts from the source texts are frequently reported in audiovisual products that translate, for instance, novels intersemiotically, comic art, with rare exceptions (see for instance Canepari, 2019) is normally characterized by more urgent space constraints, so that verbal language often undergoes further strategies of synthesis and is normally recreated and condensed by resorting to procedures of intralingual translation. Yet, intersemiotic translators have at their disposal all those features typical of the language of comics which can be strategically exploited in order to offer a valid representation of the specialized language under study. For instance, as mentioned supra, through the use and the interaction of different types of panels, translators are able to render the different relations between one part of the text and another, implying for instance causality or opposition. In particular, thanks to the principle of closure proposed by McCloud in his influential Understanding Comics (1993), according to overall decodification of the text. Indeed, the way panels are cut and shot and the manner in which frames and panel transitions are exploited, etc. interact and work in synergy, in order to provide readers with a greater freedom of interpretation, where the focus on analytical contents will intervene at a later stage. Because of this, graphic products can be fruitfully exploited in order to foster both lower and higher order thinking skills (Bloom, 1956) and can therefore play an important role in all environments that could be defined as ‘educational’. Furthermore, since graphic translations often recreate specific contexts of situation in which different characters interact, in order to render the text more accessible, not only the choice of verbal language, but, as anticipated above, also the speech bubble becomes important. For instance, next to the ‘unmarked’ speech balloon, typically rounded and with finished outlines, it is possible to find rounded balloons with intermittent outlines, indicating a lower pitch of voice; balloons with sinusoidal borders, which indicate a more mellifluous tone; balloons with angular outlines, suggesting a state of overexcitation both in joy and in anger, while the words that are only thought might be inserted in balloons ending in small circles, as for example in Disney comics, or might not be inserted in any kind of speech bubble but simply reported in the panel. Also, just as the outlines of speech bubbles instantly add significance to the text, so the outlines of the characters themselves can communicate additional meanings: for example, a character drawn with intermittent outlines normally indicates invisibility or an unstable ontological status, whereas the lines of a character, or a part of his/her body or of an object, when repeated and layered on top of each other, normally indicate rapid movements. See for instance how the ghost is represented in the graphic novel of Macbeth: All these elements, then, can be interpreted as the morphological features of the language of comics (see for instance Cohn, 2012), and obviously work in synergy in the realization of meaning. Moreover, it is evident that the selection of the speech bubble interacts with the punctuation marks, the size and style of the chosen font used. Indeed, punctuation plays a pivotal role, anticipating for instance the extra-textual receivers’ doubts or questions, and it often interacts with the selection of the speech balloons themselves, the size and style of the selected typeface, etc. If this is so, it is also to account for all the elements that have a bearing on spoken communication, in an attempt to adopt a more informal register and create a more intimate relationship with readers, thus assisting them in the decodification process. Hence, the same exclamation mark can perform different functions depending on whether it is inserted in a rounded speech balloon (where it expresses reflection and/or perplexity) or a bubble with angular outlines, which usually indicates fear or bewilderment. In an analogous fashion, the question mark, which in an unmarked balloon simply indicates the interrogative tone of a legitimate question, when appearing in larger characters, in bold, or in a balloon with angular traits, obviously indicates a different attitude on the speaker’s part, underlining for example surprise. Similarly, the three ellipses clearly take on different functions depending on the speech bubble that contains them, suggesting perhaps the characters’ perplexity or their inattentiveness. Clearly, several punctuation symbols can interact in the same balloon and their interpretation also depends on the sub-genre to which the product belongs. For instance, Manga and hybrid texts such as Amerimanga, are not only characterized by very typical graphic traits, but also by a different structure (Manga, for instance, are read from right to left and from the bottom to the top) and specific punctuation marks (for example, the wave-dash, which can make sarcasm explicit, underline the characters’ fatigue, replace their sighs or indicate the lengthened tone of a final vowel, as in the case of an exclamation). As suggested above, these intersemiotic translation strategies become extremely useful also in the identification of the turn-taking mechanism, and render comics and graphic novels very expressive, with the power to convey, as observed in the following Units, also the pace of the dialogue, the overlaps and the potential interruptions in a reasonably convincing way. As such, these intersemiotic procedures direct readers towards a more precise interpretation of the many details depicted, such as the exploitation of graphic elements that express the tone, the gaze and the body language of the characters represented. These signs are then combined with the specific elements of the visual (for example the eyes or the mouth of a character), and other icons such as drops (to indicate tears, due to sadness, or sweat, in the case of anxiety or exhaustion), hearts (to indicate love), stars (to indicate either dreams or the result of a blow or a fall), dollar signs (to indicate greed), etc., which can be used as a supplement to a character’s representation or as an integral part of it (for instance when these icons replace the eyes of the characters themselves) in order to express additional meaning. Since graphic products encourage, as suggested above, an overall reading, providing only later the collocation of analytical details within the text, research in the domain of cognition should form part of a complete theory of comics. Indeed, researchers in the field of the cognitive (neuro) sciences, as well as that of developmental psychology, have approached the issue, and research on conceptual metaphor (Lakoff and Johnson, 1980) has certainly played a vital role in the scholarly approach to comics (see for instance Bergen, 2004; Forceville, 2005, 2011; Forceville, Veale and Feyaerts, 2010; Shinohara and Matsunaka, 2009). However, for the purpose of this Module, the discussion will be mostly constrained to a translation approach, referring only occasionally to some of the notions which have been put forward in the discussion of comics (for instance ‘photology’, i.e. the study of the way the graphic modality is organized; ‘visual morphology’, which also involves a discussion of the value graphic emblems assume in different cultures, and ‘visual grammar’, especially in terms of the panel transition mentioned above). Undoubtedly, the language of comics is a visual language, even though, clearly enough, not all visual language corresponds to comic art, and this distinction becomes essential. In all the instances examined here, however, visual language is constantly analyzed together with verbal language, in either its written or spoken form, in order to address both the intersemiotic and intralingual issues raised by the texts under study. The case of infographics Infographics can be equally considered hybrid texts in which verbal language is employed together with images. Let us compare, for instance, the posters below, which relate to the same topics addressed in previous lessons, namely the medical conditions of measles. As we can see, these posters are characterized by very specific strategies in terms of the language used, the information load presented, the different structures according to which the various pieces of information are communicated, the interaction between verbal and non-verbal elements etc., in an attempt to identify the function(s) of these texts and their ideal target receivers. We can therefore see how these communications addressed to the large public are actually rendered even more accessible through a more systematic exploitation of intersemiotic translation which, by working in synergy with intralingual strategies, make the texts more comprehensible to the average reader. This is for example the case of posters such as the one realized by the World Health Organization in 2018: where a sensible use of the space constraints imposed by the format, the adoption of effective strategies of information packaging, the exploitation of specific typographical and graphic devices through which particular words are emphasized (for example capital letters, different colours, bold style, etc.), and the fruitful employment of images, manage to create a highly condensed text, which offers many of the data actually provided in more specialized articles (see Bankamp et al. 2011; Hübschen et al. 2022 among others). In addition, it is interesting to notice that the visual text performs different functions: it is certainly highly informative (in that it aims at spreading important information on the nature, the symptoms and the destructive outcome of the disease), and, simultaneously, it performs an instructive and conative function, in so far as it encourages receivers to get vaccinated in order to immunize the entire population. The text presents some of the characteristics typical of the language of medicine, such as the presence of numerals, percentages and technical terms such as “influenza” (which is not replaced by the more ordinary ‘flu’), “pneumonia” and “encephalitis”, which also point to the classic origin of many medical lexical items – ‘pneumonia’ derives in fact from the Medieval Latin form pneumonia – which derives from the Greek πνευμονία (pneumonía, meaning ‘lung disease’), from πνεύμων (pneúmōn, “lung”) + -ία (-ía) – and the exploitation of compounds, often obtained through affixation (equally of Greek or whereas Cinema is a compound of different “texts” which represent images in movement Beginning from the very outset of cinema, and during the post-war years, cinema often drew on literature. Even today 80% of films are based on a book. Yet, even today, there are many forms of resistance to this idea of transposition, often caused by an elitist idea of literature vs popular dimension of cinema. As Imelda Whelehan states in Adaptations (1999) For many people the comparison of a novel and its film version results in an almost unconscious prioritizing of the fictional origin over the resulting film, and so the main purpose of comparison becomes the measurement of the success of the film in its capacity to realize what are held to be the core meanings and values of the originary text. For instance, Jonathan Coe, in an article in The Guardian, states: Film history […] is littered with examples where a good novel has been transformed, not into an average movie, but an outright disaster […] Any two-hour feature film which attempts to render, in cinematic terms, the full complexity of a serious novel- length work of fiction is almost certainly doomed. Yet, Cristina Comencini says: Non credo sia giusto dire che il romanzo deve resistere al cinema perché sarebbe come dire che l'uomo deve resistere all'idea di prendere l'aereo. Le arti si sono sempre influenzate tra loro, ed è giusto che l'arte nuova del cinema, ormai matura, influenzi a sua volta le altre forme narrative. Dai dialoghi e dagli scontri nascono spesso le cose più interessanti. L'essenziale forse […] è che queste due forme espressive siano diverse, indaghino cioè al loro modo il pensiero, l'azione, i sentimenti degli esseri umani. Indeed, as Marenco states, Il luogo in cui cinema e narrativa si sono incontrati è l’esplicitazione dei grandi miti del nostro tempo, la testimonianza dell’esperienza, la base antropologica degli atteggiamenti, delle credenze, delle ideologie presenti nella nostra cultura. The perception of adaptation, thus, has to change, in that, as Bluestone maintains in Novels into Films (1957): What happens […] when the filmist undertakes the adaptation of a novel, given the inevitable mutation, is that he does not convert the novel at all. What he adapts is a kind of paraphrase of the novel – the novel viewed as raw material. He looks not to the organic novel, whose language is inseparable from its theme, but to the characters and incidents which have somehow detached themselves from the language, which lives in our imagination, in films we have an internal space, which means that the spectator sees what the director wants him/her to see and his/her gaze is therefore pre-determined. Indeed, as Manzoli emphasises: Yet, L’iconicità del segno cinematografico non implica che la portata dei significati di una data immagine in movimento sia immediatamente e totalmente accessibile a qualsiasi spettatore: esistono fattori culturali che intervengono a selezionare i vari livelli sui quali può attivarsi l’interpretazione dei segni in questione. Può capitare che uno spettatore non possieda la chiave per la decifrazione dei codici usati dagli autori della pellicola, in questo caso la lettura del film risulterebbe parziale, se non un vero e proprio fraintendimento. In films, just as in literature, we can talk about a denotative and a connotative level of expression. For example, with the voice over, we have an oral text that accompanies an audiovisual text and comes from an extradiegetic space/time (outside the film narrative); the spectators, but not the character/s can hear it and it can thus reinforce what is shown and/or add extra information even if there is no visual correspondence. Some elements of filmic narratology As with any discussion of literature, also in Film Studies narratological categories become essential. Narratology is a discipline and theory that was developed in France during the 1960s by structuralists and semioticians such as Greimas, Barthes and Genette. For example, to Greimas we owe the notion of isotopy, namely those lines of coherence existing between a text and its translation. This notion thus enables us to connect a source text (in the case of the specific type of intersemiotic translation we are dealing with at present, a novel) to a target text (at present, a film). Isotopies therefore enable us to evaluate the level of (un)faithfulness of a translation according to the changes the director makes in his/her translated (filmic) text. According to Greimas, we can thus have: - Thematic isotopies, that relate to the main themes approached in both the novel and the film; - Figurative isotopies, that relate to objective data of the texts (for instance spatial and temporal setting, identity and number of characters etc.) - Pathemic isotopies, that relate to the (emotive, psychological etc.) features that distinguish the characters and the changes they undergo throughout the text. The strategies of intersemiotic translatiotion Naturally, during the process of (intersemiotic) translation, directors – as translators – can adopt various strategies in order to obtain different kinds of adaptations. Indeed, directors can choose to follow at least three possible directions in their relationship with the source text: ● Being as faithful as possible to the source text; ● Using the source text as a mere pretext in order to tell a different story; ● Offering a particular and personal critical interpretation of the source text Different authors refer to these relations, in different ways. For instance Geoffrey Wagner (1975) talks about: 1. Transposition 2. Commentary 3. Analogy Whereas Swain refers to 1. Faithful adaptation 2. Partial adaptation 3. Free adaptation Whereas, according to Andrew, we can talk about: 1. Faithful adaptation 2. Intersection (when only certain topics are maintained) 3. Borrowing (recurrence of symbols and myths) However, in all three models, - In the first case, the literary text is transferred as accurately as possible (i.e. Branagh’s Frankenstein); - In the second, only some parts of the source text are turned into film sequences, whereas other parts may be left to the voice-over - In the third instance, the original text is used as a point of departure or inspiration. What we could call the “essence” of the source text is transformed (i.e. Hamlet and The Lion King) When we talk about adaptation, we also have to bear always in mind that, as Viganò clearly states: Ogni società fissa le proprie regole alle quali si devono attenere i comportamenti di coloro che intendono parteciparvi: in altre parole, esistono cose che in un film non possono essere mostrate quando invece vengono raccontate in un testo letterario. Di questa categoria fanno parte non solo, in linea di massima, scene particolarmente violente, atti sessuali espliciti, ma anche discorsi, tematiche, o gesti quotidiani che in quanto fatti cinematografici acquistano una risonanza e un impatto che non hanno in un romanzo. Di conseguenza, vengono spesso banditi. ● Sound effects ● Background noises ● Body sounds (breathing, laughter, crying, etc.) ● Music ● Actors’ facial expressions ● Gestures ● Movements ● Costumes ● Hairstyles ● Makeup ● Scenery ● Colours ● Special effects ● Three-dimensionality etc. All these elements convey additional meaning. Thus, AudioVisual Translation (AVT) needs to take all this diversified verbal and visual information into account, bearing in mind that this inseparable link between verbal and visual codes may often constrain the translation process. Multimedia translation and the modalities of AVT Audiovisual products are typically created and accessed with the support of technological apparatus. Likewise, their translations are produced and enjoyed through one or more electronic devices. For example, subtitling involves the use of sophisticated software, while dubbing and voice-over require specific hardware. The main audiovisual translation modalities are: - Subtitling; - Dubbing or dialogue adaptation; - Voice-over, which overlaps the original track – still audible in the background – with dubbed lines or dialogues previously translated; - Narration, namely a formal reprise of the voice-over, which reworks contents without bonds of labials but still respecting the rhythm; - Commentary, which, standing half way between translation and adaptation, allows great freedom in distributing information during the video; - Audiovisual description, created for the visually impaired, which has to take into consideration the audience heterogeneity and the precision of descriptions. The main modalities for screen translation of fictional products are dubbing and subtitling. Traditionally, Western Europe has been divided into a subtitling block and a dubbing block. However, nowadays the situation is no longer so clear-cut. English-speaking countries tend to prefer subtitling for the few foreign language films that enter these markets. Whereas in Italy, during Fascism, foreign languages were generally prohibited, and therefore dubbing prevailed. Dubbing According to Danan “dubbing is an assertion of the supremacy of the national language” (1991, p. 612) and is often linked to régimes wishing to exalt their national languages. And while being still true today, this aspect was certainly paramount during the Fascist régime. The aim of dubbing is to make the translated dialogue appear as though it is being uttered by the actors in the target language by means of “the replacement of the original speech by a voice track which attempts to follow as closely as possible the timing, phrasing, and lip-movements of the original dialogue” (Luyken, et al. 1991, p. 31). Dialogue adaptation or Dubbing must submit to constraints of several kinds, which end up influencing the final result. While a literary translator can work on the text and modify its phrase order - specifying or adding elements if necessary - the adaptor has to include the contents of the line in the timing imposed by the acting and the possible synthetic features of the source language. The Adaptor’s Constraints Line duration: it is essential that the lines of the actor and those of the dubber are synchronised. Labial movements: when possible, the labial movements have to coincide with the adapted words. Bilabials and fricatives, among the consonants, and every vowel, especially if emphasized by the acting, represent the main problem Mimic and gestures: the adaptor must shape the line according to the acting. The background of the scene, that is, all that surrounds the action and serves as cultural reference: from market signs to classic take-away brands, the adaptor is bound to coherence, and will unlikely opt for choices that hide or minimize the abundant presence of realia in a movie. Also: The adaptor has to pay attention to those quick moments in which the actor does not speak but still moves his/her mouth. When watching the movie in the original language, in fact, that frame may pass unnoticed, but this does not happen in the dubbed version, where a blank frame not properly “filled” generates a feeling of inconsistency. Substitution of the actors’ original performance: – Expressing all range of emotions and “re-act” the original, only not in an open set with proper costume or make-up, but rather in the little space of a dark studio. – The actor has at least complete freedom in helping his performance using all kinds of expressions and movements: the dubber has to stick to the original performance, there can be no freedom in choosing how to say a line (which becomes really painful in the case of poor acting). - Since the vocal emission varies according to the movements of the actor’s body, the dubber has to imitate (in the small space mentioned above) every position, as insignificant as it may appear, to make sure that the voice comes out with the same intensity. The dubber is thus a real actor who voluntarily chooses to communicate only with his/her voice, leaving aside any other communicative elements (body language above all) of a performance. Until now, the analysis has involved the linguistic- translational aspect of adaptors’ work. Adapting a script, however, not only implies the mere reprocessing of a script, but also requires the mastery of some unexpected technical features: using precise and conventional signs, the adaptor also redefines each visual element in the scene. Elements dubbers have to include In order to enable the dubber to understand with just a glance what is going to happen in the scene he/she will be working on: – The Time Code (TC): it is mandatory to indicate it at the beginning of every scene, to make it easier to find; Cinematographic illusion can be lost Cinematographic illusion can be kept More accessible to foreign students, deaf people ecc. More accessible to children and uneducated people Subtitles considerably reduce the actual dialogue simply because viewers need the time to read them without running the risk of missing any of the action on screen (Antonini, 2005, p. 213). They are based on a target-oriented approach, for their function is to help the audience to fully understand the audiovisual product, at the expense of source-text specificities. Subtitling saves time and money: not only does it require less equipment and less professionals to be paid; if compared to the stages a text has to go through before reaching a dubbing studio, it also halves the working time. The peculiarity of subtitles is to reproduce the oral language, preserving its typical colloquialisms or dialectal features, in a written form whose conventions must still be respected (see Perego, 2005). Yet, even if subtitles are a good aid to better enjoy the product, the immediacy and the involvement of the result suffer if compared to an adapted and dubbed script, and this is most evident in those scenes of fast-paced or overlapped lines. This is why the subtitling process involves three basic steps: elimination, rendering, and condensation. - Elimination: reducing elements that do not change the meaning of the source dialogue such as false starts, repetitions, and hesitations. - Rendering: elimination of taboo items, slang, and dialect. - Condensation: simplification of the original syntax in order to render the subs more easily readable. Conventionally, subtitles were restricted to 30/40 characters including spaces that were displayed at the centre bottom of the picture, or else left-aligned (Gottlieb, 2001b). Nowadays, such restrictions are disappearing as subtitling programs working with pixels allow letters to be modified according to space. In any case, each subtitle must generally have no more than two lines and its visibility on screen, depending on the length of the scene, cannot exceed four seconds. The processes of re-mediation that technology puts at our disposal, however, are changing the way we create and enjoy subtitles. Wider screens tend to have longer lines and DVDs allow viewers to rewind and re-read features they may have missed, while alignment changes according to the directionality of script in individual languages (Díaz Cintas & Remael, 2007). In addition, because of the possibility of placing the titles anywhere on the screen, the term caption(ing) is now becoming widespread. Code of good Subtitling Practice ● Straightforward semantic units must be used. ● Where compression of dialogue is necessary, the results must be coherent. ● Subtitle text must be distributed in sense blocks and/or grammatical units. ● As far as possible, each subtitle should be semantically self-contained. ● The language register must be appropriate and correspond to the spoken word. ● The language should be (grammatically) correct since subtitles serve as a model for literacy ● All important written information in the images should be translated and incorporated wherever possible. ● Songs must be subtitled where relevant. ● Obvious repetition of names and common comprehensible phrases need not always be subtitled. ● The in and out-times of subtitles must follow the speech rhythm of the film dialogue. ● There must be a close correlation between film dialogue and subtitle content; SL and TL should be synchronised as far as possible. ● Two-person dialogue in one subtitle should be left justified or left-centred; individual speakers should be indicated by a dash at the beginning of each line or different colours should be assigned to different characters. ● Subtitles should be highly legible with clear lettering and a font which is easy to read. ● Numbers, dates, measures etc should be written in cyphers. (May Carroll and Jan Ivarsson, 1998, 157). The case of fansubbing The word fansubbing derives from "fan" + "sub" (abbreviation for "subtitle") The expression refers to an amateur translation of (mainly) American TV series, which has emerged as a response to the demands of fans, primarily as a means of avoiding the long waits between seasons due to bureaucratic processes, as well as an alternative to dubbing, which is nowadays perceived as an outmoded, unreliable, and ultimately unsuitable mode of audio-visual transfer. Fans have abandoned mainstream broadcasting channels in order to experiment with unconventional pathways built by networks of fans, the most popular of all being ItaSA (www.italiansub.net), immediately followed by Subsfactory (www.subsfactory.it). This phenomenon is further proof of the fact that, as Banks states, formerly passive TV consumers have ended up becoming the primary actors in a major revolution, a collective subculture able to resist the hegemony of more powerful institutions (Jenkins 1992). Generally speaking, the fansubbers’ approach relates to foreignization and source- orientation, rather to domestication, which seems to be the guiding principle of mainstream subtitling. Thus, fansubbers’ translations are usually more respectful of the source text and they have led to a redefinition of subtitling standards by both professionals and academics, pointing to the need of reshaping subtitling norms, referring to different approaches, merging professional and fansubbing conventions. (Week 3) Some elements of Narratology and the notion of 're-translation The notion of isotopy As with any discussion of literature, also in Film Studies narratological categories become essential. Narratology is a discipline and theory that was developed in France during the 1960s by structuralists and semioticians such as Greimas, Barthes and Genette. Narratology was elaborated in order to analyse all kinds of texts, and it was then adaptated to the study and practice of translation in all its forms, that is to say: interlinguistic, intralinguistic and intersemiotic translation. To Greimas we owe the notion of isotopy, namely those lines of coherence existing between a text and its translation. This notion thus enables us to connect any type of source text to any type of target text. The term actually derives from the field of physical chemistry and, in semiotics, as mentioned above, it describes the elements of textual coherence linking up two or more narratives that feature certain similarities. Isotopies therefore enable us to evaluate the level of faithfulness or unfaithfulness of a translation according to the changes the translator makes in his/her translated text. This holds true, as we have seen, in the case of written texts and interlinguistic translations, and - as we shall see in this Unit - in the case of audio-visual or hybrid texts, where verbal language works in sinergy with images and, on occasions, music, sound effects etc. translated in 1962 by Giuliana De Carlo as Le locuste bianche for the Italian publisher Mondadori. In 1976, however, a new translation was realised by Silvana Antonioli Cameroni (for E/O publisher) and the title was changed into Il crollo, a more faithful translation of the source text. Yet, in 2016, another translation was realised by Alberto Pezzotta (for the publisher La nave di Teseo). In this re-translation, the title of the novel is, once again, changed, and becomes Le cose crollano, literal translation of the original in spite of the condensation of fall apart into the more economic ‘crollano’ in Italian. In an analogous fashion, the second novel by South African author J.M. Coetzee followed a similar path. Indeed, In the Heart of the Country (1977) was initially translated by Paola Splendore and published in Italy in 1993 with the title Deserto (Doninzelli publisher). In 2004, however, Franca Cavagnoli re-translated the text for Einaudi, rendering the title faithfully, as Nel cuore del paese. Clearly, this approach is determined by the desire to change considerably the target version of a text. Because of this, this type of approach is often adopted in the case of the classics, that might be re-interpreted during the new translation of a particular work. On the contrary, there are also re-translations that, as with Brick Lane above, are assigned to the same person that previously translated the text. In this case, the publisher is not therefore looking for a new interpretation, but feels the need to change some of the choices originally made, especially in terms of fidelity/infidelity, precision/imprecision, etc. A similar case is represented by the re-translation of Tolkien's work, which has recently been published. …. Genette's narratological categories: Genette's theory A few years after the publication of the seminal work by Greimas regarding the elementary structure of signification and the actantial model, which posited the basis for a scientific approach to literature and helped narratology to develop, Genette elaborated his theory of narrative discourse in his equally influential Figures III (1972), in which he accomplishes an impressive study of Proust’s À la recherche du temps perdu (1913- 27). In his work, especially Figure III and Palimpsestes, Genette identifies various categories useful to the discussion of the narrative discourse, narrators/characters etc. that, just like the notion of isotopy, might become very useful in the analysis of any kind of text and any type of translation. Genette begins his work by refining the distinction between •“story” or fabula (that is the events in their chronological order), and •“plot” or sujet (namely the re-organisation of the raw material of the story into a narrative proper) originally proposed by the Russian Formalists. He also posits a fundamental distinction between: 1) narration (which concerns the act of narrating itself and must not be confused with narrative, which is what is actually recounted), 2) story or diegesis (in French histoire, that is the sequence in which the events actually occurred), and 3) discourse or narrative (in French récit, that is the order of the events as presented in the text). This distinction becomes crucial when Genette approaches the five main categories of narrative discourse that he distinguishes and which more or less correspond to five qualities of the verb in grammar: 1) Order 2) Duration 3) Frequency 4) Mood 5) Voice The categories of Order, Duration and Frequency Order: Here Genette identifies the two fundamental asynchronies between the time of the diegesis and that of the discourse: •the prolepsis and •the analepsis that is narrative segments respectively evoking events which will either occur later in the diegesis (for example a prophecy) or which have already occurred (for example a flash- back). Each analepsis and prolepsis is characterised by its •range (in French, portée, that is the distance from the present moment of the enunciation) and its ● amplitude (that is the duration of the action described). Genette further distinguishes these figures according to whether the events evoked by these segments remain •internal or •external to the first-degree narrative (that is whether the events evoked occur, in the case of analepses, either before or after the beginning of the narrative or, in the case of prolepses, either before or after the end of the narrative). In its turn, the internal analepsis/prolepsis can be divided into •hetero-diegetic (when the content of the analepsis/prolepsis is different from the content of the first-degree narrative) or •homo-diegetic (when the content of the analepsis/prolepsis coincides with that of the first- degree narrative). Furthermore, according to Genette this last type of analepsis/prolepsis (internal, homo- diegetic) can in its turn be either ● completive (if it fills in a preceding/future lacuna of the text) or ● repetitive (if it describes events already presented in the text or which will be fully described later). Duration: Here Genette considers the relationship between the duration of the diegesis (which is measured in years, days, hours and minutes), and the duration of the discourse (measured in pages, paragraphs and lines). According to him, the velocity of the narrative will therefore correspond to a ratio between a temporal measure and a spatial measure. He then proceeds to identify what he considers are the four fundamental rhythms of the narrative. The first rhythm he analyses is the ellipsis, which is encountered when no segment of the text corresponds to any duration of the diegesis and which makes the time of the Perspective: In this section Genette identifies various kinds of characters through whose eyes everything described in the text is filtered and, drawing on a concept introduced by Russian Formalism, he names them focal characters. He therefore distinguishes between •zero focalisation, when the (omniscient) narrator knows more than the character; ● internal focalisation, when the narrator knows the same as the character and the character through whose eyes the events are described is never viewed from the exterior (this kind of focalisation can be fixed, when the focal character remains the same throughout the narrative, variable, when there are various focal characters, or multiple, when various focal characters evoke the same events from different points of view) and ● ● external focalisation, when the narrator knows, or pretends to know, less than the character (in this case the character is only described from the exterior. His feelings, his motives, even his past cannot be described, and this focalisation is therefore often used to give the character an air of mystery). Voice: This category is concerned with the narrative instance (that is the narrator, the one who speaks the narrative), the traces s/he leaves in the narrative, and what Genette calls the narrataire, that is the receiver of the narrator’s message who posits him/herself at the same diegetic level as the narrator (because of this, loosely speaking s/he could be described as a variation of the implied reader Booth described in 1961). The narrator is therefore defined as the one who speaks the narrative (and who doesn’t necessarily have to see what s described), and just like the focal character is a fictional construct and must not be confused with the real author. In order to analyse the situation of the narrator in full, Genette considers three different aspects: the time of narration, the level of narration and the person. Time of Narration Genette distinguishes four main types of narration: •ulterior (when the story precedes the narrative which, as in most cases, is therefore in the past tense); •anterior (when the narrative precedes the story and is therefore in the future tense. This kind of narrative, such as prophecy, is rare as it nullifies the reader’s suspense); •simultaneous (when the narrative develops simultaneously to the story and therefore is in the present tense. This, Genette argues, is the less complex option); finally, •interwoven (when the narration proceeds in a non-linear fashion in relation to the story and the action, as in the case of the epistolary novel or the personal journal). Levels of Narration Genette distinguishes between the •narrator of a first-degree narrative, which he calls extra-diegetic, and the •narrator of a second-degree narrative, which he calls intra-diegetic. Furthermore, he describes the relationship between these different levels and affirms that the second-degree narrative can have a •causal relationship to the first-degree narrative (such is the case of analepsis used to explain the events which have brought about the present situation), it can be related •thematically to the first-degree narrative (when the second-degree narrative tells the same story as the first-degree narrative), or can have •no explicit relation (in this case it is the narration act itself which establishes a relation between first-degree and second-degree narrative). Genette also describes the transgression of narrative level which occurs when a character present at a certain narrative level intrudes into the world created at a different level, and this he calls metalepsis. Person This category deals with the narrator’s relation to the story, distinguishing between •a narrator absent from the story s/he’s narrating, which he calls hetero-diegetic, and •a narrator present in the story s/he’s narrating either as a witness or as a hero, which he calls homo-diegetic. As Genette emphasises, absence is absolute, but there are degrees of presence, as the homo-diegetic narrator can be •auto-diegetic (when the narrator is the hero of the narrative), or can be present in the story simply as a •witness/observer without coinciding with the hero. The narrator can therefore be •extra-hetero-diegetic (if s/he narrates, in a first-degree narrative, a story from which s/he is absent), •extra-homo/auto-diegetic (if s/he narrates, in a first-degree narrative, a story in which s/he is present either as a hero or as a witness), •intra-hetero-diegetic (if s/he narrates, in a second-degree narrative, a story from which s/he is absent) or •intra-homo/auto-diegetic (if s/he narrates, in a second-degree narrative, a story in which s/he is present as a hero or a witness). Finally, Genette considers the Function the narrator may assume and distinguishes between various kinds (which do not exactly correspond to the functions Jakobson described in his model of communication): communicative (which could be either phatic, aristocratic and applied readers, by not skipping anything, may find the pleasure which «is produced in the volume of languages, in the enunciation, not in the succession of utterances» (ibid.), and enjoy the significance of the text that Barthes defines as the meaning sensually produced. However, even these aristocratic readers will find a sense of completeness and cohesion created by the formal elements of the text only at the end of the reading process. This is the reason Barthes (1970), just as the models presented here, identifies the practice of reading as a tireless process of approximation and revision in which the reader first finds and names the meanings, then un-names them in order to re-name them in the light of new elements found in the text (1994c, 562). The ‘re-reading’ phase, thus, becomes essential, in that it is only by so doing that readers will be able to appreciate the text in its entirety. Certainly, one of the first operations readers should perform is to identify the genre and the sub-genre(s) to which the text belongs. Whether translators are dealing with literature, comics or specialised texts, each (sub) genre is characterised by specific conventions, which should therefore be identified, in order to allow readers to contextualise the text properly. Each (sub) genre, in fact, activates specific scenarios that can then be confirmed or contradicted by the reading process itself. Naturally, it is occasionally difficult to assign a text to a particular (sub) genre, since the same text can share features with various (sub) genres. This is for instance particularly evident in hybrid texts, novels that rely heavily on specialised languages, and advertisements, which often are characterised by poetic features as well as informative segments. At this stage of the reading process, it becomes therefore important to notice and identify those linguistic elements that determine the insertion of a particular work into a specific (sub) genre. During this phase, readers should distinguish the various levels of analysis, taking into consideration the lexis, the morphosyntax and the general structure of the text. In order to investigate the lexical level, then, they should notice whether the lexical items used in the text stand out for their etymological origin, their technical nature, etc. Furthermore, readers should ask themselves whether the text presents binomial forms, redundant expressions or archaic expressions. At the same time, they should notice whether poetic devices such as alliterations, rhymes, assonances and/or consonances can be detected within the text, whether neologisms, compound words, etc. are used and whether numerals, abbreviations, acronyms, etc. are present. Each of these elements can in fact help identify the genre or the sub-genre to which the text can be assigned in terms of Halliday’s field (1994). For instance, the presence of binomial and archaic forms might suggest a legal register, whereas the presence of numerals, acronyms and technical terms might indicate a scientific field, whereas euphemisms and highly connotative lexical items, etc. often denote propagandistic discourse. Naturally, archaic words, as well as words of Latin origin, might point to religious discourse too, whereas neologisms could indicate both technical and scientific prose, as well as creative varieties of language such as poetry or advertising. It will be then up to readers, on the basis of the context represented in the text and the other elements it includes, to decide which genre or sub-genre the specific text s/he is reading belongs to. Simultaneously, readers should also notice whether the text, at a morphosyntactic level, presents a high number of passive voices and whether nominal forms are used. Readers should also ask themselves if it is possible to detect a persistent use of impersonal forms, whether the verbs used are, for the most part, transitive or intransitive, and whether the text is structured mainly according to parataxis or hypotaxis. In addition, readers should notice whether the text includes, if only occasionally, anomalous thematic structures. At the textual level, then, readers should identify the different narrative levels represented within the intradiegetic world of the narrative, and whether the text gives voice to second- degree narratives (Genette 1972) or sub-worlds (Eco 1988: 128). If the latter are present, readers should identify how they are signalled within the text, if at all, and how the general cohesion of the text is realised, noticing for instance if prominence is given to either grammatical or lexical cohesion. Furthermore, if visuals are present, readers should first of all identify the kind of images the text presents, recognising for instance whether they are metaphorical, informative, etc. In the case of a visual, it becomes essential for readers to identify also the relationship existing between the verbal and the non-verbal elements of the text, distinguishing for example a repetitive, additive or contrastive type of relation. From a textual and structural perspective, then, readers should notice whether the text is structured according to identifiable sections and whether within the marked and evident sections such as chapters and/or paragraphs, it is possible to identify further ‘unmarked’ sub-divisions. In addition, it is essential to notice whether the language used in each sub-section differs from that which the author adopts in other sections and whether there is a difference in the cohesive devices exploited in the various (sub) sections. Indeed, very often changes in the language used, or a marked recourse to dialogues rather than monologues, indicate a different section, albeit unmarked, that might well indicate that a different narrator is delivering the narrative. Furthermore, in any of the above scenarios, readers should also identify the contexts of situation depicted in the text, thus recognising the participants, the geographical and temporal setting etc. During this process, readers should bear in mind that if these elements cannot be identified, it is probably because the text is supposed to assume an allegorical meaning, or because the author is working against this type of identification, which is typical of realist fictions. This is why these aspects, together with the names of the characters, can also become clues that point to specific genres (for instance, as discussed below, nameless characters and undetermined spatial and temporal settings, are often typical of postmodern literature). Readers should then identify features such as speech events, speech situations and speech acts, the different registers used (formal, informal or neutral), and the level of intimacy selected. Receivers should equally bear in mind that the identification of the key is essential to recognise, for instance, whether the author is using language literally, ironically or sarcastically (Halliday 1978: 1985). In addition, they should identify whether dialects are exploited (including idiolects, geographical and temporal dialects, etc.) (Fasold 1987) and how the turn-taking system is represented, identifying for instance how the turns are passed in the dialogues inserted in the text and whether interruptions and overlaps are present (Sacks, Schegloff & Jefferson 1974). Readers should then identify the politeness strategies that have been adopted (Brown & Levinson 1987) and the potential flouting and/or violations of the cooperative principle and its maxims (Grice 1975), that the text might represent. Receivers should then take into consideration the pragmatic uses of language that authors and/or their characters, may resort to as well as the strategic uses of silences they might exploit, if at all, within the text. Readers should also identify the various semantic fields represented within the text, taking therefore into consideration metaphors, figures of speech, symbols, etc. that might be present, and assign them to the various (sub) genres identified above. Moreover, readers should recognise the various intertextual references present in the text and decode them accordingly, while identifying the specific cultural references the text includes, that is to say those elements which could confirm the inclusion of the text into a specific (sub) genre. These elements, in addition, might well activate further semantic fields, which should, then, be equally interpreted. It would also be important for readers to recognise not only the presence of taboo or politically incorrect words and expressions, but also their illocutionary force and the perlocutionary effect have. Naturally, it would be important to identify the function(s) not only of individual words and expressions, but also of the various sections and the text as a whole, just as it would be essential to recognise, as suggested above, the illocutionary and the perlocutionary force of particularly relevant sections, sentences, expressions or single lexical items. As anticipated, the indications provided within the SI model are clearly not complete, and each reader might be called to identify further elements depending on the text under analysis. However, the model, as illustrated below, points to the kind of reading many contemporary texts require and could be schematised as such: A model of interpretation 1. Identification of the (sub) genre and its defining elements: a. Lexical level: neologisms; words of Latin or Greek origin; compounds; numerals; collocations etc.; Furthermore, and, at least partially, on the basis of the target readership s/he has identified, the translator should evaluate whether the target text should (or could) perform the same function the source text had. This aspect becomes in fact essential in relation to both texts in their entirety and in relation to the individual sections that compose the source. Obviously enough, in an attempt to limit the gaps between source and target texts, translators should try to maintain the illocutionary force of the source text in the target one as well, in order to obtain the same kind of perlocutionary effect on the target audience too. However, this is not always a simple operation and it cannot be taken for granted. If this is so, it is not only because of the linguistic constraints translators have to face at every step of the translation process, but also because perhaps publishers could decide to adopt different strategies which, in terms of marketing, might appear more effective. In reality, the constraints translators have to confront are rarely taken into consideration. However, besides the limits that the linguistic and cultural systems impose, this «knight- errant of literature», as Fruttero and Lucentini define the translator (2003), often has to face various types of constraints that escape his/her control. For this reason, these constraints become essential both in terms of the management of their work flow and in terms of the quality of the final product they are likely to deliver. In any case, once translators have established the ideal reader of their work and the function the target text is supposed to perform within the target culture, they should also assess the tools that might reveal most useful during the translation of the source text (monolingual and bilingual dictionaries, corpora, online resources, etc.) and the general translation strategy they want to adopt. For instance, they might decide – in agreement with the publisher – to adopt a domesticating strategy or, on the contrary, exploit a foreignising approach (Venuti 1999), which could bring to the fore the Otherness of the source text. Naturally, these strategies might be applied either globally or locally, making allowances for strategic changes of approach according to the individual sections of the text, or the single expressions that need translating. During the phase of translation proper, then, translators, following a framework similar to the one outlined in the SI model presented before, should address the same issues discussed above, with a focus, however, on the target language and culture, in the attempt to achieve an effective target text. Indeed, during this phase, translators should identify – on the basis of the target reader and the function(s) the text is supposed to perform in the target culture – the most effective translation procedures to be adopted. Thus, one of the first operations, should lead translators to identify the features that characterise the (sub) genre(s) in the target language, focusing in particular on the differences that might distinguish the same (sub) genre(s) in different cultures. Just as during the interpretation phase, the focus should therefore be on lexis, morphosyntax and the general structure the target text should display once it is completed. For example, when translating a legal text or a (literary, audio-visual or other) text in which expressions and/or extracts from legal language are inserted, translators should consider that the source legal language and the target legal language might differ profoundly in their use of binomials, archaic expressions, etc. and that the gap between the specialised language of the law and ordinary, plain language might be different. Similarly, translators should consider how to deal with acronyms, if present, and whether the source and the target cultures are both high/low-context, or whether they rely on context differently, in which case they might have to adjust the information load accordingly, adopting strategies of either amplification or reduction (Malone 1988). Translators should also establish whether the same kind of cohesive devices used in the source text might be maintained in the target text. In particular, they should pay a great deal of attention to the fact that, for example, repetitions of words or patterns of words could be less tolerated in the receiving culture, that conjoining might work differently, that the two cultures could make a different use of punctuation, etc. Furthermore, when dealing with the various marked and unmarked sections, as well as the other aspects mentioned in the SI model as part of the interpretative process, translators should ascertain whether the same elements can work in a similar way in the target language and culture. As mentioned supra, at this stage of the process, translators should have already opted, in general terms, for either a foreignising or a domesticating strategy, and should therefore select the various procedures accordingly. In addition, they should consider the fact that, as the ethnography of speaking has emphasised, the same speech event, speech situation and speech act might be dealt with differently in different cultures, and that the same context of situation might require different uses of language. In particular, even when the context seems to coincide and activate the same kind of scenario, the register adopted in the source text might result acceptable, tolerated or unacceptable to the target reader. Moreover, certain dialects (especially geographical, temporal and gender dialects), might rely on different mechanisms and their adoption might be deployed differently according to the culture in which the speech event takes place. Furthermore, translators should be aware of the fact that, as conversational analysists have highlighted, different communities are likely to organise the turn-taking system differently. As a consequence, the following speaker might be preponderantly selected by using certain devices but not others (for instance, looking someone directly in the eye, which for instance represents a valuable gaze behaviour in the allocation of turns in Western countries, in other cultures might be considered offensive and disrespectful). Thus, when translating a written text or interacting in interlinguistic and intercultural situations, translators – as mediators – should make sure that the target receiver is likely to perceive the mechanisms adopted as they were intended in the source culture. Similarly, interruptions and overlaps might be better tolerated in a community but experienced as stressful in others, and could therefore possibly require some specific procedures. Indeed, in all these occurrences, translators, as mediators, should adopt mitigating strategies or amplify the text in order to enable target readers to appreciate and experience the text (its actants and the realities it brings to life) in the target language too. By so doing, in fact, translators will reduce the risk of an evaluation based on the imposition, on the target receiver’s part, of inappropriate interpretative grids (Lefevere 1999). In an analogous fashion, the politeness strategies identified by Brown & Levinson (1987), and the cooperative maxims elaborated by Grice (1975) might influence the use of language differently according to the culture and could rely on dissimilar linguistic devices. This aspect equally plays a major role in the de-codification and re-codification of irony, sarcasm, figurative uses of language, indirect speech acts, etc., on which pragmatics has shed light, and which, in different cultures, might be realised through different formal features. Thus, in order to maintain the isotopies described by Greimas (1979) unaltered, the importance of all these elements has to be recognised during the interpretation phase and, during the translation phase, specific procedures should be selected accordingly. Indeed, although the notion of isotopy, as mentioned above, is usually discussed in relation to intersemiotic translation, it becomes a useful parameter when discussing any type of translation. The way specific elements of the source text are rendered in the target language, in fact, can change, sometimes in important ways, the way a character from a novel or a play comes across, for example, thereby altering the perlocutionary effects and the functions that the text performed in the source language. Throughout this phase, it is important for translators to select not only the most effective strategies and procedures, but also to consider the opportunity to rely on specific CAT tools. For instance, corpora, translation memories, terminology searches, etc. might become extremely useful to render the linguistic elements of a given text effectively. This is particularly true when the translation project is assigned to a team of translators or when the text presents a certain level of repetition. Indeed, thanks to the new technologies, it is rather simple for translators to keep track of the way a particular segment was translated in previous sections of the text. As such, when translators find the same segment in the remaining of the text, they can easily retrieve the translation. This, as discussed below, is in fact essential to create a target text which is marked by the same cohesion that characterised the source text. However, translators should posit themselves as very attentive and aristocratic readers, in that, very often, the same segments are repeated with almost imperceptible differences. Hence, translators should carefully consider how to render these differences in the target language too. This holds certainly true when discussing literary texts where authors might create characters who, because of their alienation and mental instability, get somehow lost in the maze of their psyche and re-live the same experience again and again, thereby offering to readers accounts that might seem identical to previous ones, while in reality each version distinguishes itself for minor differences. At the same time, this is typical of specialised and technical texts, as well as advertisements and political discourses, where the segments could match perfectly (in which case we will talk of ‘100% match’) or, in the case of a ‘fuzzy match’, only partially. Naturally, in the last instance, it will be up to the translator to adapt the segment to the context and the co-text of the text (Arduini & Stecconi 2006). references. 3. Evaluation of the translator’s tools. 4. Identification of the function of the various (sub) sections, if any are present, and of the text as a whole. Identification of the illocutionary and perlocutionary force of various sections/sentences etc. 5. Identification of the source text (implied) reader. Translation Phase 1. Identification of the target text reader. 2. Identification of the function the translated text will have to perform in the target culture. 3. Selection of the general translation strategy (domesticating vs foreignising; literal vs idiomatic etc.) 4. Identification of the (sub) genre(s) and its defining elements in the target language/culture: a. Lexical level: neologisms; words of Latin or Greek origin; compounds; numerals; collocations etc.; b. Morphosyntactic level: parataxis vs hypotaxis; active vs passive forms; transitive vs intransitive verbs; nominalizations; personal vs impersonal subjects etc. c. Textual Level: check whether the cohesive devices of the source text can be maintained in the target text. Identify the various (sub) sections of the text. Check whether the relationship between verbal elements and, if present, visual ones, can be maintained in the target text without creating internal inconsistencies and/or running into censorship. Check whether the various narrative levels can be easily maintained in the TT. Check whether the elements of the source text can be maintained in terms of: context of situation; speech events, speech situations, speech acts; registers; dialects; turn-taking system; politeness strategies; potential flouting and/or violations of the principle of cooperation and its maxims; pragmatic uses of language; strategic uses of silences etc. 2. Identification of the linguistic elements that determine the semantic fields in the target language. 3. Comparative analysis between the semantic fields of the source and target text and assessment as to whether all semantic fields present in the former can be represented in the latter. 4. Selection of the possible translation procedures in the rendition of: semantic fields; cultural references; intertextual references. Post-Translation Phase 1. Check the coherence and consistency of the various (sub) sections and of the text as a whole. Check the coherence and consistency of the translator’s interventions. 2. Evaluate the translation losses and consider possible compensating strategies. 3. Check whether some (both verbal and visual) items might result taboo, blasphemous or politically incorrect in the target language/culture and decide whether to include/exclude them in/from the text. 4. Check whether the main isotopies have been maintained in the target text. Brooke-Rose's first experimental tetralogy abd the novel Between The present section applies, albeit somewhat rapidly, the above model to the novel Between, published by British author Christine Brooke-Rose in 1968, to emphasise how its analysis (and translation) might considerably benefit from the adoption of the aforesaid model. This novel appears particularly interesting, not only because in this text the author depicts a central character who works as a simultaneous translator, which therefore renders the discussion of this book particularly fitting in a volume focused on different types of translation, but also because the linguistic constraint the author imposes on her text (which is entirely written without ever resorting to the use of the verb ‘to be’), together with the various textual devices she adopts, make it particularly stimulating, as well as extremely difficult to decode and translate. The translation of the novel published by Feltrinelli in 1971 – an almost unique case as far as the translation of Brooke-Rose’s fictional works into other languages is concerned[1] – can therefore serve as a useful testing ground for the assessment of the efficacy of the model presented here. Between is the third experimental novel published by Brooke-Rose after the first four novels that adhered to the canons of realism and presents in a more decisive way the notion according to which the coexistence of (and the exposure to) different languages leads to a fragmentation of the individual’s personality, thus focusing on the notion of intertext – that infinite text outside of which, as Roland Barthes argues in Le plaisir du texte (1973), it is impossible to live (1994e, p. 1512). Furthermore, the novel raises important issues, and by often rendering the ontological status of the characters and the events described in the text impossible to identify, it defines the limits of many of the theories which are intertextually referred to throughout the text and which Brooke-Rose exposes as partial versions of the ‘truth’. As the following sections will clarify, the use of language the author makes in this text turns it into a multi-layered and complex novel. As such, this section contends that a systematic approach conducted on the basis of the model presented above might help translators to realise an effective final product, able to perform at least some of the functions of the source text. Indeed, any inattentive reading would invalidate not only the pleasure of the act of reading itself but also the project developed by the author in her work, inevitably leading to important repercussions on any form of translation of the text. Pre-Translation phase: Analysing Between 1. Identification of the genre: a. Lexical level Within the text, translators are confronted with innumerable instances of code-mixing and code-switching, the text having been written in twenty-six different languages. Moreover, since the novel presents extracts from the various conferences the main character is called upon to translate, readers are confronted with the cohabitation of different registers too, as the academic communications are often characterised by a more specialised register. Thus, it follows that, within the text, readers can identify many words of different etymology and various compound forms, numerals, as well as – by virtue of the (often interlinguistic) puns the central character creates – neologisms, meaning transferrals, unusual collocations etc. In the novel, the author investigates the feeling of alienation that travelling to a country whose language is unknown might provoke. Due to the fact that, in this novel, Brooke- Rose explores ‘what it’s like to be bilingual, and what it’s like also not to know all the languages’ (Brooke-Rose 1990: 30), ‘Between the enormous wings the body of the plane stretches its one hundred and twenty seats […] Between doing and not doing the body floats’ (Brooke-Rose, 1986, p. 395). Whereas in the previous novels the objectivity of the descriptions offered by the narrators contrasted with the metaphors and the poetic passages they produced, in Between the impersonal tone of the narrative (which finds a justification in the fact that the character, being a professional interpreter, supposedly uses language very precisely), contrasts with the metaphors produced by the mistranslations she makes. On the one hand, readers are therefore faced with an imaginative use of language on the part of the character, thanks to which the assonance of one word with another can displace the scene described to another place and time. On the other, they are confronted with the objectivity of her descriptions which in Between is applied to the character’s personal life and memories. These are related throughout the text as if they belonged to someone else, and precisely because the central character recounts her life in a very impersonal tone, the identification of the events, the characters and the subject of the enunciation of her de-personalised account becomes at times rather difficult. This is why a systematic pre-translation phase can offer a valid tool in the interpretation of the text, since it is only by assessing the value that all the signs on the page acquire that the context of situation (the geographical and temporal setting, the focal characters, the level of the narrative etc.) can be identified. For example, although her job as a simultaneous translator is hinted at early on through a reference to ‘the glass booth’ (ivi, p. 398), her gender will be clarified only when further references to her hair (ivi, p. 429) enable the reader to attribute retrospectively to the central character the initial reference to ‘The girl [who] lays her rich auburn head on the lap of the handsome man cross-legged’ (ivi, p. 397). Readers are therefore initially unable to make sense of the first few pages of the text, and they will not be in a position to interpret the initial cataphoric references until later in the text. Even then, however, they cannot always identify with certainty the subject of the enunciation, a clear sign of the dissolution of her identity. As such, this ‘woman of uncertain age’ (ivi, p. 445) is never introduced by name: the waiters and other characters she encounters during her flight/s mainly refer to her as ‘Mademoiselle’ and ‘Madame’ (ivi, p. 423, 444), whereas she is affectionately called ‘ma poupée’ by her mother (ivi, p. 523), ‘Liebes’ by her friend Siegfried (ivi, p. 418), and the ‘gentildonna’ (ivi, p. 511), ‘ma douce amour’ (ivi, p. 534) and ‘ma déesse’ (ivi, p. 543) by her French suitor infatuated with the Italian poet Guido Cavalcanti. The character thus comes to stand for different persons according to who is perceiving her, and her supposedly unitary and fixed identity is therefore dispersed in the various social individualities she has to assume in her everyday life. Furthermore, not only has the proper name she was christened with never been acknowledged by others, but replaced by impersonal (although affectionate) appellations, but she also paradoxically becomes a ‘non-person’, an ‘impersonal person’ in the de-personalised story of her personal life, thus becoming an emblem of the absence of the unitary identity which would be implied in the recognition the individual is granted when called by his/her name. This is why the verb ‘to be’ is never found in this novel, and why its title is a preposition which etymologically derives from the fusion of ‘be’ and ‘two’. Indeed, the notion that the exposure to different languages brings about a split of the subject’s identity constitutes the central motif of Between. Here, in fact, by focusing her investigation on the ‘loss of identity through language’ she experienced as a child (Brooke-Rose, 1989, p. 32), Brooke-Rose creates a central character who, by virtue of her profession, is exposed to so many fragments of various cultures and to so many different languages, that her personality becomes simply a mosaic of other people’s. In this novel, Brooke-Rose therefore places at the core of her narrative a central character with a passive relationship to language, which she never uses to formulate original ideas but simply to transpose other people’s from one language into another. Trapped between different areas of knowledge, the character feels she belongs to ‘no field at all, just translation’ (Brooke-Rose, 1986, p. 467), and neither she nor Siegfried are required to have any original ideas (ivi, p. 413). In order to translate successfully, in fact, they must abandon their own identity so as to assume that of the author they are translating, and this incessant shift of identity causes the loss of their own. We can therefore see how the grammatical constraint Brooke-Rose imposes on her experimental text also finds its justification on a thematic and existential level, as nothing and no-one, in this novel, can simply ‘be’: in the central character’s discourse, places, events and characters are continually transformed into one another, and the woman translator herself keeps shifting identities according to her interlocutors, the conference she is translating, the country she is in, the time zone and so on. Even more fundamentally than the author him/herself, a translator simply coincides with the linguistic subject of the enunciation behind which there is not a person, but a double void: the person represented in the translator’s enunciation is not in fact the translator him/herself, but the person responding to the name of ‘author’ who, in his/her turn, has already become simply the subject of the enunciation and has disappeared from his/her text as a person. The origin which in Barthes’ opinion gets lost in writing, then, is further displaced when the text is filtered through a translator, as the latter loses his/her authorship of his/her enunciation twofold , both as the author of the translation (for s/he is the result of systems of conventions and his/her translation depends on systems which s/he does not control), and as the author of the text itself, in whose original production s/he did not participate. The translator thus simultaneously assumes the double role of sender and receiver of the message, which corresponds to that of the reader and (because the author becomes a paper-being at the very moment s/he begins to write), that of the text. Brooke-Rose’s character therefore becomes an emblem of the split subject of the Lacanian Mirror phase – since she coincides with both the one who watches (the reader), and the one who is watched (the text) – and just as the child, for Lacan, recognises him/herself in a misleading narcissistic reflection, the identity she acquires cannot but be alienated. The learning of other languages could in fact be seen as a renewal of the original split which took place at the entry of the individual into language; with each renovation the distance from what Western tradition has supposed to be the original self becomes greater, the break more profound, and the individual more alienated and distanced not only from his/her ideal innermost self, but also from his/her first linguistic self. It is precisely in the attempt to recapture part of her self, that the character tries to obtain a job in Paris: by going back to her mother-country, she would live in the language of her childhood, and in the hope that through her maternal language she might rekindle a long lost love, she accepts the courtship of her French suitor (ivi, p. 516, 540). Furthermore, it is always to restore her linguistic integrity that she tries to have her marriage annulled. This wish, in fact, is in my opinion neither determined by her desire to remarry, nor, as Suleiman suggests, by her sole wish to restore the integrity that her divorce broke (1995, p. 101), but rather as an attempt to restore her linguistic origin, since, through her English husband, she had to assimilate yet another language. Were the split that the English language provoked to be eliminated through the annulment, and the entry into the German language eliminated through the process of denazification which she has to endure, the central character believes that she would be able to live ‘monolingually’ in French, undoing the divisions her identity had to suffer. However, she cannot ‘Persil-Schein’ her German layers away that easily (Brooke- Rose, 1986, p. 517), and because the annulment of her marriage cannot eliminate the fact that she was once married, the character’s search for an integral self fails, and her relationship with Bernard results in a hopeless, suffocating love-affair. Through the linguistic displacements her discourse accomplishes, her suitor’s love, through the transformation of the custom declaration into a declaration of love, becomes in fact a plant which obsessively tries to suffocate her (ivi, p. 537), and love itself becomes a construction of the words of the phrasebook which spring to her mind whenever she thinks about her French suitor (ivi, p. 431). Despite her return to her mother tongue, the character cannot therefore overcome the original split which characterises her as a human being, and is consequently unable to recapture her original, undivided self. The various languages she has entered (and the various ensuing ‘selves’) thus correspond to the various layers of Troy unearthed by archaeologists and which, as the Thus, thanks to the free-ranging syntax of Between – through which ‘a sentence can start in one place or time, continue correctly, yet by the end of the sentence one is elsewhere’ (Brooke-Rose, 1991, p. 7) – the geographical displacements correspond to temporal displacements, and this sense of mobility is also suggested by the many active verbs exploited in the text. Hence, although the novel is never set in any precise post- war period (even though the fact that structuralism is presented as just beginning hints at the early 1960s as a possible setting), readers can find many references which indicate the passing of time, demonstrating that the novel covers, whether through analepses or first-degree narration, most of the character’s life. For instance, the ‘young beginner in the art of understanding immediately’ (Brooke-Rose, 1986, p. 429), initially addressed as ‘mademoiselle’ (ivi, p. 422), soon becomes a ‘madame’ (ivi, p. 466). As her age increases, although never precisely (ivi, pp. 424, 466), the lawsuit she initiated to have her war-time marriage annulled progresses and is finally resolved ‘just in time for the menopause’ (ivi, p. 570). Simultaneously, time passes for her friend Siegfried too, who grows balder and balder (ivi, pp. 457, 514). Hence, by the end of the novel, the ‘Fräulein’ (ivi, p. 444) has been transformed into a ‘desiccated skeletal alleinstehende Frau’ (ivi, p. 565), and the text has covered the period ‘between the zest of youth and the wisdom of old age where lies a not so long period of relief repose and resignation called the middle ages’ (ivi, p. 558). The span of the narrative could therefore vary from the few hours of a single flight to many years, and by raising the doubt as to whether the world of the novel actually coincides with a world of (fictional) elements such as toilet doors and hotels, or only with a world of words, the text finally interrogates pre-conceived notions of reality. Within the text, readers can certainly identify clearly marked sections. Yet, because of what was observed above, within these sections readers are often confronted with innumerable unmarked subsections, which continually modify the different situations depicted in the novel. Indeed, in spite of this loss of her identity through language(s), the translator’s consciousness, as this phase of the model highlights, still filters what is described in the text, and every description must be assumed to be filtered through her. Consequently, because of the many geographical displacements her job exposes her to, and the various temporal displacements she creates through her discourse, the determination of the situation she is describing at any particular time can prove rather difficult. Subsequently, the ontological ambiguity with which Brooke-Rose permeates all the descriptions in the novel renders all the meanings readers impose upon the text an arbitrary construction of their own words, so that no single reading and no single meaning the reader might find is more valid than any other, and this is why the woman translator of Between should be recognised as representing the resistance of the text. Thus, this character represents a very particular reader and text, which comes close to the reader and the text described by Barthes in Le plaisir du texte (1973). Indeed, the mixing and cohabitation of different languages and discourses turn Between not only into a fine example of what Barthes would define, in 1970, as the plural text (1994b: 564) but, more precisely, a prototype of ‘the text of pleasure’ which he was first to describe in 1973. The reader for whom the central character stands seems in fact to coincide with an early version of the ‘anti-hero’ referred to by Barthes, namely the reader of the text when he achieves his pleasure. Then the old biblical myth is reversed, the confusion of languages is no longer a punishment, the subject achieves pleasure through the cohabitation of different languages which work side by side: the text of pleasure is a happy Babel (1994e, p. 1495, emphasis in the original). Simultaneously, the woman translator also becomes an emblem of the ‘text of pleasure’ itself. In fact, because in Between language coincides with both the text and the subject of the text – given that the woman, the central character of the text, is language – she can be defined as a piece of writing not only because she is a paper-creature of the author, but also because she shares the fundamental characteristics of ‘writing’ that Barthes was later to define in various essays following the publication of Between. For instance, not only is she distinguished by her loss of identity, just as ‘writing’ is, for Barthes (1970), characterised by the loss of every origin/identity (1994b: 491), but she also shares the ability of ‘writing’, as discussed by Barthes in ‘La paix culturelle’, to borrow others’ speeches and mix various languages (1994c, p. 1613), and just as for Barthes (1970) the text is composed of multiple writings collected in the reader (1994b, p. 495), so Brooke-Rose’s character consists of all the speeches she accumulates in herself, which therefore come to stand for the various ‘voices’ and the ‘quotations without quotation marks’ which constitute writing itself (ivi, p. 568). The authority which the original authors of the various conference-papers lost the moment they began to write therefore becomes even more undermined when quotations from these papers are inserted into the character’s discourse without her being able to identify their origin. These plagiarisms, which readers conversant with structuralist and poststructuralist theory will recognise, therefore function as her intertext, transforming her into a piece of writing, that is, for Barthes (1971), the site where different languages come into play and where all authority is lost (1994, p. 1217). This is the reason why Brooke-Rose’s novel could be identified as an example of the text of pleasure Barthes describes. Indeed, in Between readers are confronted with a remarkably sensual and erotic language which, as receivers will appreciate by analysing the semantic fields the author exploits, originates from the images of words loving ‘each other’ (Brooke-Rose, 1986, p. 517), as during the love-affair the character has by airmail with her suitor, it is as if As a consequence of the fact that this eroticism is brought about mainly by the temporal dialect Bernard uses in his letters, where he often resorts to medieval French, and is closely connected to the attempts the central character makes to return to her mother tongue (of which the language Bernard uses is a dated version), the text becomes even more closely related to pleasure in a Barthesian sense. The mother tongue is in fact identified by Barthes (1973) as the only object which is in a constant relationship with pleasure (1994, p. 1513), and therefore becomes, contrary to the character’s expectations, a determining factor in the loss of identity that pleasure entails. Consequently, in the struggle for identity through which each individual endeavours not to be completely submerged by the discourse of others, the woman translator loses, and by completely losing her identity, she accomplishes, as a text, the aim of all ‘writing’. In her, the power of intimidation of language is annulled and no discourse dominates, for, if one of the discourses she is spoken through reached hegemony, she would (through coercion, if by nothing else) achieve an identity. To the attacks that each language launches in the attempt to make her commit herself to a single idea (Brooke-Rose, 1986, p. 413), the character opposes a ‘willing suspension of loyalty to anyone’ (ivi:461), and by internalising the phrase ‘all ideas have equality before God’ (ivi, pp. 398, 426) which Siegfried repeats throughout the novel, she puts into practice his conviction that ‘nothing deserves a flow of rash enthusiasm’ (ivi, p. 426), or a ‘moment of attention’ (ivi, p. 457). Hence, her suspension between ‘belief and disbelief’ (ivi, pp. 406, 444-445), ‘loving and not loving’ (ivi, p. 420, 445), loyalty and disloyalty (which derives from her lack of a strong sense of nationality), fundamentally indicates her assertion of independence. It is actually by assuming within herself the impossibility of an identity and a fixed meaning In the novel, Brooke-Rose actually denounces the risks implicit in a mere reversal of the positions of the ‘I’ and the ‘Other’ and shows how the German and French interviews fundamentally coincide with one another, not only by underlining their similarities through repetition, but also by showing, through the juxtapositions and the syntax characteristic of this novel, how one led to the other (ivi, pp. 526-527). By so doing, she makes it explicit that language is used in both cases to force the subject to assume either the identity of the allies or the enemy and, in particular, she shows how, in order to empower the individuals to shift from one role to the other, after the war the government began to dispense to German citizens the certificates of denazification referred to as ‘OMO’, the homophone of the brand name of a new washing powder discussed by Barthes (1957) in Mythologies (1993, pp. 584-585) and which Brooke-Rose introduces in her text (1986, pp. 419, 432). Through the slogans the media use to advertise the detergent, Brooke-Rose suggests a similarity between the powder and the denazification certificate and quoting (without quotation marks) an undated letter from Eva Hesse, she has Siegfried observe: ‘quite like the end of the war trying to get a job and a Persil-Schein certificate denazifying us whiter than white’ (ivi, p. 473). Through the polysemy of ‘OMO’ and the juxtaposition of television programmes with extracts from the interviews the central character has to endure (ivi, p. 418), Brooke- Rose therefore suggests the equivalence of the linguistic techniques these discourses adopt in their attempted colonisation of the Other, and implicitly questions the authority on which the denazification process is based. All acts of language, then, come to be perceived as acts of propaganda, and not only does she propose that all ideologies are fictions, but, by juxtaposing extracts from the news (the alleged deliverers of the ‘truth’) with advertisements for new products (ivi, pp. 418, 519), she also suggests the fictionality of the truth the media claim to deliver. Like historians such as Hayden White (1973), Brooke-Rose thus elaborates on the same question relating to the status of the historical discourse which dates back to the nineteenth-century debate between Hegel and Nietzsche, and she proposes the notion of history as a ‘writing’ whose signifiers can be continually rehandled so as to achieve acceptability and conform to one’s truth. Moreover, the analysis of the various semantic fields exploited within the text brings to the fore the fact that the novel also touches upon the issue of religion, which is central in the case of the character’s annulment. By the time Between is published, religion has become identified with a construction of words proven wrong again and again by history (Brooke-Rose, 1986, p. 462). In addition, not only are the vital mysteries euphemised and narrowed into convenient dogmas (ivi, p. 463), but through the juxtaposition of different languages and registers, the discourse of Catholicism is equated with the language of a phrasebook (ivi, pp. 431, 439) and with that adopted during the interviews the translator has to endure so as to get a job (ivi, p. 444) and a denazification certificate (ivi, p. 473). What in fact, implicitly asks Brooke-Rose, is an annulment if not a further deletion of history which the Catholic system, through the language of canonical law, has the power to perform? And, what is the Church’s ability to choose whether or not an individual is to be granted a second chance in life if not an imposition of an identity upon the subject (married/not married which then might become sinner/not sinner)? In this text, Brooke-Rose therefore suggests that the power of the word that characterised the God described by the Scriptures seems to have been inherited by the men who supposedly speak in His voice. However, precisely because the Church identifies itself with the institution which represents God on Earth, it becomes, by its own admission, a mediated personification of the unrepresentable ultimate Other and, as such, only a partial version of the Truth. The language of the Catholic Church is therefore identified, in Between, with a further sociolect which, like all jargons, fights for hegemony, and although the violence of the Crusades and the Inquisition remains a rare exception, Brooke-Rose suggests that the Church’s politics of colonisation, exclusion and discrimination (against women, for example) continue to be perpetrated. The attitude of demystification towards all institutions and all theories, then, is directed by Brooke-Rose towards religion as well, which equally attempts the colonisation of the (feminine) Other. Yet, through the very creativity of language she exploits throughout, Brooke-Rose’s character is able to oppose the system and survive: the various languages with which readers are confronted in this novel do not simply block the woman translator, but also stimulate her imagination, her intuitive and associative skills, and through mistranslations ensure the displacements and the development of the text, and since the woman translator is a creation of language both at an intradiegetic level (because of her profession) and at an extratextual level (since she is a creature of the author’s pen), this guarantees her survival. This holds true in relation to another essential theme the novel addresses, which appears closely connected to the various cultural and intertextual references the author exploits in her text. In particular, Brooke-Rose often refers here to structuralist theory, exploring the consequences it can have in relation to the position of women in society. Indeed, Between is the first novel overtly concerned with gender issues and in fact the resistance which Brooke-Rose’s character, as suggested above, opposes to categorisation, does not only exemplify the resistance of the text against the readers’ attempt to impose indisputable labels on it, but also stands for the problematic classification of ‘woman’ and the impossibility of defining ‘femininity’. By striving to demonstrate the non-existence of a fundamental feminine identity, in Between Brooke-Rose not only sets herself in opposition to the deterministic theories of femininity which saw in woman’s biology the basis of a ‘feminine identity’, but also distinguishes herself from a whole section of Feminist work that emphasises the essentially different qualities of woman. It is always in this novel that Brooke-Rose, as anticipated above, makes a first attempt to expose the oppressive rigidity of structuralism exposing the attempts made by the language of theory and the ‘scientific’ jargon of structuralism to colonise the subject and the imposition of its version of the ‘truth’ as real. As a matter of fact, for the first time, through the mouth of a conference speaker, it makes explicit (if ironic) reference to Saussurian and post-Saussurian theories of language, exploring the implications that the discourse of structuralist theory has for women. As the pre-translation phase immediately shows, the gender issue is in fact introduced at the very beginning of the text through the sentence (repeated throughout the text), ‘in some countries the women would segregate still to the left of the aisle, the men less numerous to the right’ (ivi: 395, 400), and the whole novel is centred on the idea that the translator has a passive relation to language. In this context, then, the fact that Brooke-Rose decided to change her initially male character into a woman assumes a particular importance: as she herself suggests in an interview, because the passivity enacted by the translator could be identified with a feminine experience, she found the novel ‘mysteriously’ worked better once she had made her simultaneous interpreter a woman (1990, p. 32). Since this cliché of woman’s passivity is related to the cliché of woman’s lack of creativity that Brooke-Rose more consistently exposes in other novels, the central character of Between comes to stand, on the one hand, for the female experimental writer who, in our patriarchal society, has almost invariably been dismissed and only ever grudgingly admitted to the literary Canon (represented in Between by the Tower of Babel with which it metaphorically shares its hierarchical and phallic structure); on the structure of the Tower rather than its phallic symbolism. Power is in fact inherent in its structure, and it is precisely because of the hierarchy which fashions it that the Tower assumes a phallic shape. In fact, even though the plane with which the Barthesian Tower is substituted in Between bears the same phallic symbolism, because it develops horizontally, i.e. non-hierarchically, it allows for the fraternisation of languages. Brooke-Rose therefore unwittingly shows how Barthes’ dream of an egalitarian society is doomed to failure because the shape he gives to this utopian society maintains the hierarchical relations of power, and she demonstrates that if history repeats itself, it is because the structure of the Tower only allows the development of history to describe a spiral, the image that Vico (1725) originally used to illustrate his notion of the historical ricorso. Hence, by substituting the Tower with a plane, Brooke-Rose demonstrates that the ‘war of languages’ can be at least partly overcome, and through the use her central character makes of language, she illustrates how at least a partial victory over the system can be achieved. Language is, after all, what enables the character to survive, not only because it is through language(s) that she can earn a living as a translator, but also because, on a narrative level, language makes possible the various displacements which occur in the novel and it keeps both the text and the character alive. Thus, the character, who might have originally seemed a victim of the coercive use of language, finally becomes the female who resists male-hierarchical society, and because, by assuming the impossibility of a fixed identity, she escapes all attempts by men to relegate her to a position of subjugation, it would appear that Brooke-Rose leaves hope, in this as well as in her other novels, for woman, and for the woman writer in particular. Even this brief analysis of the text under discussion therefore demonstrates how a model such as that introduced above might become a useful tool in the interpretation and translation of such a complex text. Indeed, it is only by identifying the various - intertextual and cultural references, - the repetitions and repetitions with variations, - the sudden changes in time and space accomplished through metonymic switches or phonological mistranslations based on false cognates etc., that the text can perform its multiple functions and obtain the effect the author had in mind when writing. 2. Evaluation of the translator’s tools Certainly, because of the important cohesive devices used in the text, especially in terms of repetitions and repetitions with variations, translators might take into consideration the opportunity to create a specific memory for their translation project which, thanks to the exploitation of other tools such as the ‘find and replace’ searches, might save time and help them produce cohesive texts. It goes without saying that since, as specified below, many of these are not 100% matches but only fuzzy matches (because some of the words, the order of words etc. might present minor variations), the translators’ control is in any case fundamental. 3. Identification of the function of the various (sub) sections, if any are present, and of the text as a whole As the previous paragraphs have emphasised, the functions of this novel are multiple. Certainly, besides the entertainment function typical of the novelistic genre (Halliday, 1985), the text certainly performs a more informative role, not only because readers, thanks to the insertion of various languages, can pick up some of the words and expressions whose meaning is generally made clear or translated within the immediate cotext in which they appear, but also because, by presenting extracts from various conferences and intertextually referring to various theories, the novel offers a considerable amount of information. Furthermore, as discussed above, the text and its author intend to alert the readers and oblige them to abandon the passivity implied by realism and focus on the words written on the page. Moreover, as suggested above, Brooke-Rose wants her text to make readers understand what being bilingual means and what it is like also to be ignorant of all the languages they might be confronted with in their lives. In addition, by constantly displacing the narrative both temporally and geographically and by blurring the ontological status of the characters and the events described, the various threads developed within the text and its often unmarked sections point to the fact that the novel as a whole and its various marked and unmarked sections strive to demonstrate the fallacy and untenability of many notions that were posited in the past as the ‘truth’. The novel therefore clearly has, as one of its main purposes, that of calling into question notions of identity, focusing in particular on gender identity, as well as issues related to historical and religious discourse. 4. Identification of the source text (implied) reader. The readers this novel implies are thus clearly very sophisticated, applied and, as Barthes (1973) would define them (1994e, p. 1500), ‘aristocratic’ (as opposed to ‘vulgar’). These are readers who, contrary to the readers of the realist tradition, do not read for the plot but, by focusing thoroughly on what the author has assigned to writing, may find the pleasure of the text which ‘is produced in the volume of languages, in the enunciation, not in the succession of utterances’ (ibid.). 5. Selection of the general translation strategy Because one of the main functions of the text depends on the presence of many different languages, and because the author essentially posits herself as a translator (of languages other than English and of reality itself), the strategies she adopts – for example by exploiting many instances of code-mixing and code-switching – should be respected and maintained in the target text as well. As such, the text clearly requires a foreignising approach, in that its aim is, precisely, to destabilise the readers and estrange them, just as the source text does. Naturally, because, as suggested above, the foreign words and expressions inserted in the text often connect to each other and manage to create a peculiar syntactical structure that allows the text to proceed, on various occasions both the foreign words or the translation of the English parts of the text will need to be adapted or substituted in order to allow the target text to perform the same function as that of the source and obtain similar effects. Translation phase: Translating between interlingually 1. Identification of the target text reader Even though, as by now widely accepted, people from different cultures obviously approach the reading practice differently (see for instance Schieffelin et al., 1986; Field & Aebersold, 1990), Brooke-Rose’s effort to forge an ‘aristocratic reader’ in her source text should be identified as the target of the translated text too which should encourage Italian receivers to read attentively, because, as Barthes maintains, in language everything is significant (1994b, p. 589). 2. Identification of the function the translated text will have to perform in the target culture Similarly, the translated text should perform the same functions as the source and have similar effects on target receivers. Clearly, the entertainment function typical of the novel in the source text is easily maintained in the target language too, just like the informative function that can rely on the zero-translation strategy that Anna delle Piane (who translated the text for Feltrinelli in 1971) adopted for the segments in different languages, which are therefore able to perform also another important function of the text, namely the defamiliarization process this novel engages. In an analogous fashion, the information conveyed by the extracts taken from the various conferences can be transposed into the target language fairly easily. However, it is important to consider that often these extracts connect with other elements of the text and create metaphors, puns etc. which, as noted above, enable the narrative to proceed. This is why, as suggested above, occasionally also the extracts in a foreign language might be adapted, in order to maintain in the target text the illocutionary and perlocutionary force of the source. For instance, in the extract referred to above, where the word ‘EXCHANGE’ is used in English to displace the scene from the plane (where no real communication can ever take place) and the airport (where passengers ‘exchange their money’ and can find the bureau de change, an expression which, albeit pronounced differently, from an orthographic perspective coincides with part of the previous word, thereby facilitating the connection and displacement. In the Italian text, however, the word is maintained in English and the extract reads: while referring to the same notion throughout, in other parts of the text is translated as scambio (ivi, p. 118), although it is left unchanged in the previous pages. 4. Check whether the elements of the source text can be maintained As mentioned above, although most of the context of situations depicted in the target text are maintained, in that the Italian version of the novel, which equally presents displacements from the plane, to the airports, the hotel rooms etc., thus involving each time different participants, different idiolects and so on, occasionally the target text is characterised by the adoption of a different register and different diastratic and diatopic varieties of language that were absent in the source text. Further to the instances pointed out supra, for example, a lexical item such as paturnie (‘dumps’ – ivi, p. 158) can be identified as an expression of a particular temporal and social dialect; the word cesso we find on the following page (‘loo’ – ivi, p. 159), is characterised by a level of vulgarity which is not present in the source text, whereas the expression perdio (‘Goddam it’ – ivi, p. 162), seems much stronger than the source text and, bearing in mind the Ten Commandments, comes close to blasphemy. 5. Identification of the semantic fields in the target language In order to be able to develop the different levels of meaning present in the original novel, the target text should reproduce the same semantic fields present in the source. This is generally achieved by the translator who, by following closely the source text, manages to exploit the same semantic fields also in her translation. 6. Comparative analysis between the semantic fields Despite the general preservation of all the semantic fields inserted in the source text, some of the choices adopted in the target text render their identification more difficult. This is the case, as commented above, with the zero-translation strategy occasionally applied to those parts which, by being written in English in the source text, should have been translated, as can be seen in the example of the ‘exchange’ or the references to the Persil detergent briefly discussed above. Indeed, their non-translation risks invalidate some of the metaphorical uses of these words and the semantic fields to which they point in the source text. Moreover, another semantic field which is perhaps not effectively represented is that of structuralist theory. It is true that the names of Saussure and Strauss are also inserted in the target text (ivi, pp. 43, 135), yet the terms which relate more directly to their theories are not always translated and therefore prevent the target text from activating the same references to the keywords of linguistic theory in Italian. If a zero- translation can appear convenient for example in the case of notions such as langue and parole, which would have required expansion strategies to be rendered into Italian, the adoption of a zero strategy in the case of other dichotomies such as système and syntagme appears rather ineffective and, in the case of the pair signifié and signifiant, prevents the text from fully activating the semantic field. Moreover, the solution the Italian translator adopts in the rendition of these terms, which are normally translated as significante (‘signifier’) and significato (‘signified’), occasionally leads readers astray. This is the case for instance with the Italian dichotomy contenente (‘that which contains’) and contenuto (‘that which is contained’, but also ‘meaning’, and therefore ‘signified’), which loses its impact and cannot be easily decoded by readers. 7. Selection of the possible translation procedures The choice of zero-translation as a useful strategy for most of the text, then, should have been assessed more carefully in each (unmarked) section, where occasionally a procedure of equivalence, based on the intertextual references under discussion and the way specific notions have become known in Italian, would have achieved a more effective result. Post-translation Phase: Analysing the translated text 1. Check the coherence and consistency of the text and the translation strategies The inconsistency of some of the translation choices commented in the previous paragraphs would have certainly become apparent during a thorough post-translation phase, when translators should complete a circular movement and attentively re-read their work from the beginning. Undoubtedly, the approach of the translator appears very consistent, since she often adopts a zero-translation strategy. Yet, in order to safeguard the coherence and the cohesion of the source text, this strategy could have on occasions been modulated more carefully and localised according to the sub-section in which it was applied. 2. Evaluate the translation losses and consider possible compensating strategies As discussed above, some of the losses could have been avoided simply by adopting a procedure of equivalence or by resorting to cultural translation (as with the various detergents mentioned in the source text), as opposed to zero-translation. 3. Check whether some (both verbal and visual) items might prove to be taboo, blasphemous, or politically incorrect As far as taboo and blasphemous words or expressions are concerned, since in Italy, as underlined supra, the Catholic Church is very much present and the Commandments (relevantly here: ‘Thou shall not take the name of the Lord thy God in vain’) are learned in childhood, during this phase the translator might have reviewed the decision to use the expression perdio mentioned above and substitute it with an alternative turn of phrase that makes no mention of the name of God. 4. Check whether the main isotopies have been maintained in the target text Certainly, what was observed in the previous paragraph, as well as some of the diatopic and diatrastic variations of the target text which bring about a change in the register used, run the risk of changing some of the isotopies of the source, especially in terms of pathemic isotopies, since the character in the target text comes across as more abrupt and slapdash. Indeed, also the selection of the Italian word parossismo used to translate the English word ‘frenzy’ in one of the most important segments of the text, when the central character observes: E allora le lingue fraternizzano in un parossismo di fornicazione by airmail par avion via aerea Luftpost ΑΕΡΟΠΟΡΙΚΏΣ (ivi, p. 171), seems to change the message conveyed and the pathemic isotopy relating to the central character. The Italian word, in fact, generally brings with it a negative connotation that makes it closer to words such as ‘exasperation’ and ‘annoyance’. On the contrary, the source text, by adopting the word ‘frenzy’, patently emphasises the intensity of the fornication, without, however, introducing negative nuances, which inevitably reflect on the character herself. Naturally, in the light of the complexity of this novel, the analysis of the source text and its translation could be far more exhaustive. Yet, even the few examples discussed above demonstrate how a systematic approach to the original text, an attentive evaluation of each translation choice and a thorough re-reading of the final product might facilitate the creation of an effective final product, able to perform the functions of the source text and obtain similar effects on target readers. Naturally, often the focus of individual disciplines is too limited to account for the worlds that are created through language in specific products. For instance, even the Skopostheorie (Vermeer, 1996), which has had the great merit of highlighting the fundamental role played by the function of the text during the translation process, does not take into consideration the cultural complexity of the translation process (in relation to either the source or the target text). Furthermore, the theory tends to ignore not only the fact that target texts can often retain only some of the original functions but also that they are able to assume different functions within the target culture. (Week 5) …. Monica Ali's Brik Lane Remakes as forms of re-translations: The ideological power of translation Ideological aspects of remakes Having acquired some of the basic notions of intersemiotic translation in the pevious Unit, in the first two modules of this Unit, we are going to analyse how the novel Jane Eyre was re- written from the postcolonial point of view by Rhys and published as the novel Wide Sargasso Sea. Furthermore, we are going to see how the filmic transpositions of these As the story progresses, however, we get the feeling more and more of urgency and disaster that the author/director wants to convey. This is clearly done in order to construe as a lunatic and a dangerous character the woman who will later be identified as the one responsible for all these actions. A close reading, however, can lead us to question the moral character of Rochester, in that he seems quite happy to court Jane, while engaged to another woman. Naturally, Brontë is staging here the romantic kind of love that justifies everything and wins. In the end, Jane accepts Rochester’s proposal, despite his engagement which, as he declares, has nothing to do with love. Even though at this stage in the narrative readers/viewers are led to believe that Rochester’s love for Jane is real and should therefore conquer all, this proposal, which according to social standards would be rather unacceptable in view of his previous engagement, obviously assumes an even more sinister meaning when we discover he was already married. It is precisely during their wedding that we discover Rochester’s secret and are finally able to meet the ‘ghost’ that has been haunting the house and some of the characters since the very beginning. Once again, the male character is presented as the good and honest man who did what he did in order not to disappoint his family and who was benevolent enough not to leave his wife. On the contrary, he took her to England and locked her up in a room for the rest of her life, while carrying on with his social life and love life. video Perhaps at this moment more than ever, in Brontë’s novel, Bertha is introduced as a sub-human Other in opposition to the Englishman Rochester: I was of a good race […] I had marked neither modesty, nor benevolence, nor candour, nor refinement in her mind or manners […] I found her nature wholly alien to mine; her tastes obnoxious to me; her cast of mind common, low, narrow, and singularly incapable of being led to anything higher […] what a pigmy intellect she had (p. 321-3). Throughout the novel, the author refers to Bertha in animalistic and objectifying terms. She is in fact referred to as ‘something’ (p. 155); ‘almost like a dog’ (p.219); ‘savage face’ (p.297); ‘what it was, whether beast or human being, one could not tell […] it was covered with clothing; and a quantity of dark, grizzled hair (p.307). Rochester is thus equally posited as a victim of Bertha’s sexual degeneration: the true daughter of an infamous mother dragged me through the hideous and degrading agonies which must attend a man bound to a wife at once intemperate and unchaste (p. 323). The final aim of these descriptions is, as in the best Colonialist tradition, to build up the native (in this instance Bertha), as the ‘Other’ against whom the Westerner Rochester could be construed as the ‘I’, the superior, flawless Subject. By doing this, the woman is relegated to the role of the inferior, degenerate Object. Wide Sargasso Sea Rhys’s novel, on the contrary, tells an altogether different story. First of all, the strategies of dramatic synthesis and the strategy of shifting are exploited at a macro-level (in that the novel and its film adaption posit themselves as pre-sequels to Jane Eyre). In Wide Sargasso Sea we actually meet Bertha almost immediately; she is represented as in one of the final scenes of Jane Eyre: dressed in a white nightdress, barefoot, with long hair and, more importantly, locked up and referred to as ‘mad’. video The same strategies are applied at a micro-level, in that Maher's production begins with the fire that, in Zeffirelli’s adaptation, almost closes the film. Here, however, there is a fundamental difference, in that whereas in Jane Eyre the fire was the result of Bertha’s malicious nature, in Wide Sargasso Sea it is represented as an accident. More importantly, Rhys’s text and its intersemiotic translation question from the very beginning the Otherness and the madness of Bertha. Indeed, the text suggests that she is driven insane by the coldness Rochester shows after he hears rumours about her mother and is alienated by his attempt to ‘colonise’ her. Indeed, she is driven mad by the pressure Rochester puts on her as to explain and justify her identity and her lineage. More fundamentally, the fact that the woman who was born as Antoinette is given a new name by the coloniser, naturally entails a displacement of identity. Rhys, however, also questions the superiority and the Subject position held by Rochester himself. In Wide Sargasso Sea, it is in fact Rochester who lies to Antoinette: I kissed her fervently, promising her peace, happiness, safety (p. 48). He is the one who is morally and sexually degenerate, and who is unfaithful to her. video Furtermore, Rhys clearly states that he was not duped into marrying Antoinette. On the contrary, he fervently wanted to marry her and, contrary to what he would declare later on in Brontë's version, he was not at all disgusted by the look of her: I [Rochester] wondered why I had never realized how beautiful she was. Her hair was combed away from her face and fell smoothly far below her waist (p. 49). In fact, from the very beginning, he is obviously willing to accept the dangers inherent in the place of the Other in order to profit from its riches. Fundamentally, it is Rochester who takes the final step towards her construction as a sub- human Other by lying to her, telling her that in England she will be seen by a doctor, while already knowing on the contrary he will lock her up and chain her like an animal. The way the women in Rochester’s life wear their hair thus appears particularly relevant. The savage, uncontrollable and mad nature of Antoinette, is represented by her long hair. This is quite different from the way Bertha tries to wear her hair in order to adapt to the lifestyle of her British Master. Through intertextuality, the alternation of oppressor/victim is reversed and Brontë’s animalistic descriptions of Bertha are applied by Rhys to Antoinette’s oppressors. Thus, via Antoinette, Rhys’s novel urgently poses the question ‘Who is the traitor?’ (p.74), and this powerful criticism to the world Brontë’s novel depicts is rendered more effective through the exploitation of the iconographic language of films. Naturally, this extremely succinct analysis does not justice neither to the novels nor to the filmic productions. Yet, this section was conceived as a simple exemplification of the many elements that audio-visual products bring together in their rendition of formerly written texts. Clearly, in the case of such complex texts, where intertextual references play such a fundamental role, readers’ ability to recognise these references, activate connections, interpret pragmatic uses of language as well as its silences, etc., becomes essential. These aspects, naturally, become even more fundamental when the text needs translating. Indeed, as suggested above, this holds true in the case of any type of translation, thus including inter and intrasemiotic transpositions. Thus, as the SI and SIT models prompt receivers and translators to do, the identification of the various semantic fields, the understanding of the symbolic uses of colours, the interpretation of the distance characters keep between them, etc., become essential in the appreciation of the filmic text itself. Furthermore, as the brief analysis of Maher’s filmic text above suggests, the way a source text is reformulated in a target text can result, as we shall see below, in very different versions of the same text and of reality itself.