What to look for in Italian to English translation
by Linda Makins M.A. M.C.I.L. M.I.T.I. January 2009
When approaching the job of translation between any language pair, two main areas have to be addressed, the first of these is purely linguistic and the second, less obvious, but equally vital, is cultural.
To tackle the linguistic issues first, in the context of Italian to English translation, we look first at overall text structure. While wishing to avoid sweeping generalisations and, for the sake of brevity, skating over the inevitable differences between different text types, or genres, if words are the basic building blocks of the construct that is a text, these are held together and arranged in larger units: sentences and paragraphs. To extend the building metaphor further, Italian displays much of the baroque while English has more in common with modernism, if not occasionally brutalism. In many Italian texts paragraphs can seem endless and sentences can be incredibly complex with much use of the semi-colon, something that is almost an endangered species in 21st century English in all but the most literary of texts. Whole sentences within sentences can appear in parenthesis and of course, since Italian word order is so much more fluid than English, it can take a while even to locate the subject of the sentence. The intellectual demands Italian texts can make on their readers are simply not acceptable in the fast-food world of English, and translators who know their job spend much time chopping up and rearranging these wonderfully convoluted confections, at times resembling a plate of tangled spaghetti, into more digestible, bite-size chunks that can be wolfed down on the run. A path through such complexity often has to be beaten with very heavy use of link-words that are superfluous once the shorter, simpler sentence structure has been established, and serve only to clutter it up.
To zoom in on word-level issues, because English has many historical influences in common with Italian, ‘false friends’ abound. For example, ‘sensibile’ in Italian has nothing to do with comfy but unglamorous footwear, in modern English it translates as ‘sensitive’, as ‘sensible’ once did in Jane Austen’s day. Similarly, the Italian verb ‘pretendere’ still bears the meaning of ‘have a claim on/aspire to’ that it did in English in the era of Bonnie Prince Charlie and there is no hint of the make-believe that today’s equivalent ‘pretend’ conveys. Then a cause of much mirth is the use of ‘suggestive’ for ‘suggestivo’, frequently mistranslated in travel-industry texts and applied to atmospheric historic, often religious buildings, or picturesque natural landscapes, that have absolutely no ‘naughty bits’ attached.
Many European governments and academic institutions lament that insidious viral infection that is the English language creeping into and polluting the ‘purity’ of their own languages, but what many people fail to realise is that not only do these parasites invade the host, they can also change their form and/or meaning in the process. In Italian, ‘un manager’ implies a very senior executive, and is never used for an office or shop manager with a staff of two or three, ‘un relax’ is a noun and ‘un babysitter’ is what the English-speaking world would refer to variously as a nanny, childminder or au pair, never a bored teenager looking after the kids for an occasional evening while the parents are out on the town. Translators home in like heat-seeking missiles on English words and phrases that pop up in Italian texts, as nine times of ten, they need to be changed either for something entirely different or used in a different grammatical context.
These linguistic issues obviously demonstrate that translators are more than walking, talking dictionaries, and anyway the use of bi-lingual dictionaries leads many an amateur up the garden path. The person producing the translation absolutely must have an in-depth and academically grounded knowledge of the source language, its history, structure and the way this is changing with use, all of which is equal to that of a native speaker. Even more important however is the ability to be aware of such pitfalls and to produce a translation that is in the right idiom for the end-purpose of the text, so translators must be native-speakers of the target text, or have used it habitually as their main language for many years and, in both cases, actually have some writing talent in that language.
This brings me neatly on to the cultural minefield. Modern applied linguistic dogma states that the language/culture link is not only indissoluble, but is an embodiment of the chicken/egg conundrum. People create texts to be read, it could be argued that even ‘private’ diaries are often designed with an eye to future publication, as the diarist dreams of fame and fortune. The person or people who have written a text want it to have a particular impact on a particular audience but when the target audience becomes a different language group inhabiting a different cultural environment, what may have been a soundly constructed building, perfectly in keeping with the original landscape, can become a disastrous eyesore in the new one.
To cover everything relevant, in this context, to the differences between Italian and English would take a book, so here are just a few obvious and fundamental examples.
Firstly, formality: in common with most European languages Italian has both a polite and an informal ‘you’, something that English has lacked for several centuries, you address the policeman who has just stopped you for speeding as ‘you’ just as you do your own family and friends. This produces a greater cultural gulf between the formal and informal implying that, in general, Italian business communications are couched in more formal language overall, with more complex salutations and sign-off phrases. Not only does it take a lot longer to get on first-name terms in the Italian corporate world, but there is widespread use of all sorts of professional titles as forms of address: ‘ingegneure’ (engineer) ‘avvocato’ (lawyer), ‘architetto’ etc. whereas the only one in common use in English is ‘Dr.’. On the subject of the Italian ‘dottore’ (male) and dottoressa (female), this does not necessarily equate to a medical doctor or a person with a PhD, but is frequently used by anyone with a bachelor’s degree. These are issues that competent translators have to know so as not to risk misleading the English language readers.
Another cultural difference that has its roots in a language with masculine and feminine nouns, is the issue of sexism in language. With a few exceptions, the feminine version of professional titles in English, such as manageress, authoress, and horrors like ‘lady doctor’ are thankfully defunct, a professional is a professional regardless of her or his gender, easily accomplished as our grammar does not demand this distinction. This extends to things like the use of ‘lui’ the masculine pronoun, he, or ‘l’uomo’ (man), that it is still perfectly acceptable to apply to members of the human race in general in Italy but strictly non-PC in English. Failure to understand this cultural divide can cause a badly translated text to cause offence, not usually the desired outcome.
Differences in formality extend to differences in directness in texts destined for corporate websites and CVs. UK, US and other English language groups are more in-your-face, company executives wishing to put across how wonderful their outfit is will speak directly to their audience, addressing them as ‘you’ and of course referring all the time to the company itself as ‘we/us/our products’. Italian on the other hand tends to use the third person ‘it’, creating an immediate distance, which if translated as such robs even the most purple prose of its impact. Similarly, Italian CVs are still invariably written in the third person: ‘he/she’ has done this that and the other, rather than the egoistical ‘I’, implying that I’m the best thing that could ever happen to your company, by establishing a personal relationship immediately. These sort of texts are like shop windows, so poor translations are the equivalent of turning the display lights off or covering the window with a thick layer of grime!
On a technical note, this lack of directness in Italian carried over into English can actually prove hazardous. For example, in a technical manual for a piece of equipment or machinery, the direct imperatives ‘do this’, or more importantly, ‘don’t do that’, are the convention in English, so a rather formal passive ‘this should (not) be done’ can send the signal that plugging the machine into the wrong mains power may not necessarily be lethal to the machine or the operator.
Finally, translators have to know when to adapt cultural references for the new audience. Specific religious metaphors familiar to almost all in a country that is still largely Catholic, by tradition if not necessarily by practice, can be mystifying to more multi-ethnic target groups. Philosophy, classical mythology and indeed Latin and Greek, are routinely studied in a large swathe of Italy’s more academic secondary schools, not the case in most Anglophone countries, so those sort of allusions have to go. Translation customers absolutely must be secure in the knowledge that the person handling their precious text, that they may themselves have sweated long and hard over to get just right for their own compatriots, has the skills knowledge and creativity to treat it with equal care and respect. A text contains messages, it is a communicative medium and, in order to get those vital messages across, clearly, unequivocally and make the right impression on the readers, only a translator with a full, up-to-date knowledge of, and empathy for, those readers’ own culture and their expectations of the text in question will do!