Volume 9 (2017): Edition 2 (December 2017)

Both interlingual translation shifts and poetic production can be seen from a semiotic perspective in terms of mental filtering. The shared ground of the three processes - cognition, translation, versification - is to be found in the semiotic perspective: signs (prototext, reality, perception) are interpreted and worked through (mind, interpretants, cognition) and give as an output an object (metatext, poem, worldview). By trying to classify the shifts resulting from such processes - distortions - with a semiotically shared grid of categories, the hypothesis is that the categories themselves - already existing within the separate fields - can be reciprocally fine-tuned. The very notion of “shift” - derived from translation criticism, and in particular from the prototext-metatext comparison - becomes in this hypothesis a connection transforming the shifts possible in the other mentioned fields into mutual benchmarks.

The present paper aims to present significant results stemming from the FACS (Full Access to Cultural Spaces) project, launched in 2014 by the University of Macerata and concluded in 2016. In particular, this paper reports on stages one and two of the FACS project which aimed first to explore the state of the art of universal access services across a large variety of museums in Italy and nine other EU countries. Based on the first stage, an analysis of some of the most significant data obtained from a questionnaire sent out to over 1,200 European museums will be presented, with a special focus on multilingual devices and access services for the sensory impaired. The first stage was followed by an eye-tracking study on an Italian museum, Turin’s Museo Nazionale del Cinema (National Cinema Museum), aimed at evaluating visitors’ experience, attitudes and patterns of fruition through a test with a portable eye tracker (Tobii Pro Glasses 2, 50 Hz). Based on this second stage, the fruition of information panels by museum visitors at the Museo Nazionale del Cinema will be explored, specifically focusing on reading patterns and behaviours.

Hard-nosed female investigators Sara Lund and Saga Norén from the extraordinarily successful Scandinavian TV crime series The Killing and The Bridge are the latest examples of female hard-boiled detectives - dysfunctional loners who solve crimes where no one else succeeds. This article looks at the character construct of the hard-boiled male detective, maps these tropes against social expectations of gender norms and then considers how Sara Paretsky constructs an explicitly feminist “tough guy” private eye in V.I. Warshawski. It then analyses how Paretsky’s negotiation and partial subversion of the tropes of the hard-boiled genre are handled in translation, drawing on the German translation of Indemnity Only.

In an increasingly globalized and digitalized world, where the advancement of technologies and media constructions oversimplify and manipulate public beliefs and shared knowledge, the artistic sector seems to provide new networks of solidarity, collaboration and interaction that challenge a world dominated by conflicts and cultural shocks. Against this backdrop, acts of translation within the arts bear witness to humanity and become the ultimate ground for subjective expression and fundamental reflections upon individualist attitudes against migration issues. By putting emphasis on the role of translation in its political transfer of migration into the arts, this investigation draws attention to a recent corpus of works of art that testifies to the modalities by means of which the creative cultural industries are contributing to giving voice to migration not just as transruption and memory, but as an inclusive form of movement and communication. In Notes on the Exodus by Richard Flanagan, with illustrations by Ben Quilty (2016), and in the arts installations Call Me By My Name and All I Left Behind. All I Will Discover (London, 2017), translation intervenes as an instrument of cross-cultural collaboration and solidarity, resistance and dissent, and also demonstrates to what extent stories of migration can interact within art forms and be performed as acts of translation involving processes of (re)narration and (re)framing of identities.

Interest in African literature and translation is relatively new; it mainly emerged in the 1990s with the postcolonial turn in translation studies, under the influence of the cultural turn, the polysystems theory and the “Manipulation School”. Many African writers describe themselves as intercultural translators; they hover over the following questions: Is it a form of selfdenigration not to use one’s mother tongue as a medium of literary creation? How can their literary creations account for their postcolonial experience in the languages of former colonizers? Can these languages render the specificities of their distinct cultural worldviews? The linguistic choice made by African writers is hence highly political because it involves a compromise that rests on power relations. Their writing often involves a sort of translation from Source Language (SL) to Target Language (TL) whether through ethnotextual mental translation or self-translation.

The authors of the paper focus on the intercultural dimension in the translation of advertising texts, attempting to compare and illustrate the influence of cultural elements upon advertising text-creation in American, German and Slovak cultural spaces. Reflecting the social, psychological and cultural aspects of translation transfer, they survey the tension between the domestic and the foreign and consequent choices in translation strategy. They present tendencies observed across a span of almost two decades in the translation of advertising texts into Slovak and provide possible explanations for their development.