Translating Migrations, (Re)Presenting Cultures in Transit: Licia Canton’s “The Motorcycle”

This essay investigates the relationship between the idea of movement and the concept of translation in Licia Canton’s short story “The Motorcycle” and in its Italian translation. The essay looks at translation both as a metaphor of negotiation and mediation that bridges two linguistic and cultural backgrounds and as a process thanks to which a text can effectively circulate in several languages and cultures. Thanks to some excerpts taken from the Italian text, the issue of the accent, that of self-translation and identity are explored through the lens of language, underlining its role in shaping and conveying images and narratives of the migrant.

Learning from others' experience: A taste of parallel corpus analysis for translation students and budding corpus researchers

This contribution describes the potential of parallel corpus analysis for the development of research skills in the translation classroom. Using culinary texts as a case in point, and more specifically a culturally salient Italian text from the turn of the 19th century (Pellegrino Artusi's La scienza in cucina e l'arte del mangiar bene/Science in the kitchen and the art of eating well, in its original Italian and translated English version), a detailed analysis is offered of the Italian equivalents of the verb lemma COOK and of the English equivalents of the Italian verb lemma CUOCERE, showing how the paradigmatic and syntagmatic insights thus obtained could be used to construct bilingual lexical/terminological profiles of units of meaning, and/or to shed light on translation strategies and norms, depending on one's research hypotheses and variables. Two more unorthodox uses of parallel corpora to tap into translators' domain-specific knowledge, and as aids in the interpretation of culturally salient historical and literary texts, are also discussed.

Automatic Classification of Text Complexity

This work introduces an automatic classification system for measuring the complexity level of a given Italian text under a linguistic point-of-view. The task of measuring the complexity of a text is cast to a supervised classification problem by exploiting a dataset of texts purposely produced by linguistic experts for second language teaching and assessment purposes. The commonly adopted Common European Framework of Reference for Languages (CEFR) levels were used as target classification classes, texts were elaborated by considering a large set of numeric linguistic features, and an experimental comparison among ten widely used machine learning models was conducted. The results show that the proposed approach is able to obtain a good prediction accuracy, while a further analysis was conducted in order to identify the categories of features that influenced the predictions.

Recollections of the Future in the Italian Text of Andrei Beloborodov

This article explores the work of Andrei Yakovlevich Beloborodov (1886–1965), an architect, graphic artist, and memoirist. An outstanding representative of Russian emigration, he has long been ranked among the names of the highest order abroad. Beloborodov gained great fame in Italy, where he settled down in 1934 and where his gift as an architect and graphic artist flourished. Beloborodov was an author of the iconic architectural and publishing projects of the early twentieth century; however, his name has been forgotten in his homeland. The article tracks the biographical background of the artist’s work and the pre-revolutionary period of their formation, later described by Beloborodov in his Memoirs. The author examines the place of the Palladian architect in the architectural tradition of the early twentieth century, which revived great Italian classicism in St Petersburg. Beloborodov’s work is explored comprehensively: his memoir heritage is interpreted as part of a single discourse of a retrospective architect, while his outstanding long-term graphic cycle The Great Island (Grande Isola, 1939–1953) is considered part of the general mnemonic tradition of Russian abroad, which was especially clearly manifested in the literature of the first wave of Russian emigration. Special attention is paid to the image of the city as a model of the world in the artist’s graphic design. Beloborodov’s philosophy of the city and fantasy urban cycles are considered as part of the émigré “post-Petersburg” text. At the same time, the island symbolism and metaphorical architectural images in the cycle Great Island are compared with the “architectural” code of the later projects of the Russian abroad in the interwar years (Chisla and Novy Grad magazines). The article’s author employs historical, hermeneutic, and comparative research methods. The purpose of the work is to actualise Beloborodov’s artistic heritage. One of the main results of the study is to provide a multidimensional reception of this outstanding architect/idiosyncratic memoirist and help study his urban metaphysics as a close interweaving of Italian and Russian architectural traditions, a vivid illustration of the relevant sociopolitical and cultural dialogue of the 1930s around the international place of the Russian abroad.

Thomas Kyd's The Householder's Philosophy and Cristoforo Landino's Comento sopra la Comedia di Dante

Thomas Kyd's The Householder's Philosophy (1588) is a translation of Torquato Tasso's Il padre di famiglia (1582). While translating Tasso's text, Kyd made some sizeable additions to it, which would appear to spell out his stance on a series of issues. In particular, Kyd significantly expands Tasso's discussion on usury. Kyd's take on usury can be divided into two sections: first, a fiery invective followed by a quotation from Dante; second, a less heated denunciation based on a rational argument summarizing Aristotle's take on the matter. While the former seems to be Kyd's own invention, as scholars have previously suggested, no one has ever pointed out that the latter is in fact plagiarized from another Italian text, namely Cristoforo Landino's Comento sopra la Comedia di Dante (1481). Among other reasons, this discovery seems especially interesting because it adds another piece to the patchy mosaic of Kyd's intellectual life. As it happens, Kyd's decision to insert elements from such an encyclopedically comprehensive humanist text of literary criticism as Landino's Comento into a philosophical tract imbued with humanist notions concerning society, the family, astrology, philosophy, and cosmography seems further to connect Kyd with the continental intellectual milieu. The latter thus appears to have caught Kyd's interest even beyond his well-known penchant for neo-Senecan drama and French Renaissance literature.