The text “Placebos” is made of three paragraphs: a paragraph is a textual unit made of
sentences. At the end of each paragraph we normally find a full stop. In a paragraph, there
may be one or more sentences, which normally constitute a development of thought, the
development of ideas on the same topic.
Today we are going to look at ways to effectively translate the text “Placebos” from English
into Italian.
Understanding a text and attempting a translation
Before translating a text, it may be useful to first read it through. If the text is very long and
made of several paragraphs, you may not want to read the whole text, but you are surely
advised to read a whole paragraph before translating it.
Translation from one language into another is realized through steps: the very first one is
that of reading and understanding the source text. Understanding a text implies not only
the understanding of each single word (its grammar category and function) but also finding
the relations between words at the sentence level, the relations between sentences at the
paragraph level and, finally, the relations between paragraphs when we consider the text
as a whole semantic unit.
Each text is written with an audience in mind: as far as scientific texts are concerned,
these may be informative texts written for the general public, that is, people who do not
have a solid background in the subject field of toxicology or pharmacy, or they may be
written specifically for toxicologists or pharmacists: in this latter case, it is no surprise that
texts include specialized terminology, and abbreviations, whose meaning can be easily
understood only by experts in the field of toxicology and pharmacology.
Cohesion and coherence: these two terms might sound quite similar, but actually
express two very different ideas.
IV. Cohesion
The function of syntax. The surface text in active storage. Closely-knit patterns: phrase,
clause, and sentence. Augmented transition networks. Grammatical dependencies.
Rules as procedures. Micro-states and macro-states. Hold stack. Re-using patterns:
recurrence; partial recurrence; parallelism; paraphrase. Compacting patterns: pro-forms;
anaphora and cataphora; ellipsis; trade-off between compactness and clarity. Signalling
relations: tense and aspect; updating; junction: conjunction, disjunction, contrajunction,
and subordination; modality. Functional sentence perspective. Intonation.
V. Coherence
Meaning versus sense. Non-determinacy, ambiguity, and polyvalence. Continuity of
senses. Textual worlds. Concepts and relations. Strength of linkage: determinate, typical,
and accidental knowledge. Decomposition. Procedural semantics. Activation. Chunks
and global patterns. Spreading activation. Episodic and semantic memory. Economy.
Frames, schemas, plans, and scripts. Inheritance. Primary and secondary concepts.
Operators. Building a text-world model. Inferencing. The world-knowledge correlate.
Reference.
Eg: Mario is very tall, he’s 195 cm.
Eg: Mario’s very tall, he’s 150 cm (a person who is 150 cm tall cannot be regarded as
being “very tall”. Therefore, this sentence is incoherent, unless prosody (the way it is
pronounced) makes it sound ironic.
Eg: The cat is black, therefore it’s white.
Although this sentence is grammatically correct, it does not make much sense: if we say
that a cat is “black” it cannot also be “white”: the second sentence is incoherent as far as
the information provided by the first sentence is concerned, because it states the exact
contrary.
Variatio: one important difference between English and Italian texts is that English texts
tend to be more repetitive than Italian ones. In English, coherency is often realized through
repetition of the same exact terminology throughout the text, whereas in Italian, we tend to
use synonyms, to vary the vocabulary (in Latin variatio). You need to keep these in mind
when you translate from English into Italian.