FOR A METHODOLOGY OF TRANSLATION CRITISIM: THE ITALIAN TRANSLATIONS OF THE SECRET SHARER BY JOSEPH CONRAD

Translation Studies encompass various more specific fields which imply tackling the phenomenon of translating from different angles: translation process analysis (synchronic approach), history of translation (diachronic approach), (inter)cultural translation studies, intersemiotic translation (multimediality, intermediality), etc. One of these subclasses is translation criticism, which is one of the most neglected areas due to the lack of interrelationship of theory, criticism and practice. By adopting a descriptive and empirical (functional) approach, contemporary translation criticism features these specific aspects: it is not aimed at “finding mistakes” and it shuns generic, impressionistic and scientifically unmotivated commentaries by identifying categories to classify translations shifts, i.e. differences between source text and target text. Translation criticism is not exclusively metatext-oriented as it was before the introduction of descriptive Translation Studies; it has a reconstructing approach aimed at tracking the translation strategy underlying the process from the prototext to the metatext; it seeks strategic consistence and pinpoints strategic inconsistencies. As for translation shifts, research is still in its infancy: by following the empirical practice, it is necessary to produce a hypothetical model, test it against practice, modify it and eventually re-test it. In this sense, the most conspicuous contributions in the field of translation criticism were given by van Leuven-Zwart (1989) and House (1997), whose models will be illustrated in Chapters 2 and 4. Due to the lack of communication between the translation industry and academic research, on the one hand the notions heralded by Translation Studies are regarded as “parochial,” “too technical” and “academic” by professionals (a category that includes editors, proof-readers, translation agencies and all the other figures working in the translation industry) who oftentimes prefer relying exclusively on their own experience, on the other hand scholars sometimes fail to make their findings accessible to whole community of practitioners. The goal of this dissertation is to bridge this gap and develop a model that synthesises various contributions so that it provides those interested in translation criticism with a source of (exhaustive, if possible) translational metalanguage. The model will be tested against a case study, i.e. a text in English having different translations: the selected text is Joseph Conrad’s The Secret Sharer, which has twelve Italian versions published from 1940s to 2007. The thesis is structured as follows. Chapter 2 reviews and critically examines approaches to translation criticism and translation quality assessment, as well as other contributions which do not specifically deal with the subject matter but are crucial for theoretical or methodological purposes. Chapter 3 is a brief text analysis of the prototext that pinpoints the linguistic and translatological aspects identified in the theoretical section; the analysis also entails extratextual elements such as the historical background, the author’s cultural background, the creation process underlying the novella and intertexts. The model for translation criticism is illustrated in Chapter 4 and is applied to the selected target texts in Chapter 5, which also synthesises the main tendencies found during the metatext analysis. A final chapter summarises the results – also in a diachronic perspective – and attempts to assess the model itself and make some suggestions for its usage.