Vortit Italice. La lingua italiana della traduzione. Linee guida per la definizione del traduttese dalle lingue classiche

Abstract

The task of translating ancient languages into Italian has distinctive features with respect translating from modern, currently spoken languages. The differences are even more pronounced in translation practices at school, where students are still developing familiarity with the source language. In this paper, the main aspects of translationese from ancient languages to Italian in a didactic context are discussed. The linguistic arguments at the base of this concept are also supported by a preliminary quantitative analysis performed on a pilot corpus, which indicates that simple statistical models can distinguish texts originally written in Italian and those translated from Latin with high accuracy. These interdisciplinary considerations reveal the need for collecting and analyzing high school students’ translations through an ad hoc experiment, and some practical guidelines are proposed.