Translating Sentences from Italian to English: A Case Study

Dr Isobel Grave

Cassamarca Lecturer in Italian at the University of South Australia

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Key Words: Equivalence, syntax and sentence form, punctuation, text type

Abstract This paper highlights the significance of equivalent sentence structure in texts transferred from Italian to English, two languages which show a high degree of syntactic parallelism, as well as correspondence within the writing system as regards punctuation. The study is based on a corpus of data gathered from three modern Italian first-person narratives (Stefano Bennis Margherita Dolcevita, Niccol Ammanitis Io non ho paura and Rosa Cappiellos Paese fortunato), and their English translations. The data is classified according to sentence form: simple sentences, main subordinate clause nexuses, and sentences in the form of a coordination of clauses. The relevance of these forms to discourse structure and narrative development is discussed. The data bring to light numerous variations between source text and translation as regards the number and form of sentences. One of these is an increase in the number of simple sentences in the translation relative to the original in one sourcetarget pair. It is hypothesised that this might connect to a tendency in the TT to standardise non-standard ST structures. The second half of the paper then explores this hypothesis, examining one sentence form outside the paradigms available to English and Italian specifically the loose association of clauses coordinated by commas. The study finds the loose association of clauses in Italian has been standardised in the translation with reference to normative frameworks, often divided into two or more free-standing sentences hence the increase in TT simple sentences recorded by the data. The paper concludes by interrogating the role of punctuation in text types that are designed to be reminiscent of the spoken text without resorting to direct speech, and points up the fact that punctuation signs vary in their correlation with one or other of the two systems of expression, graphological or spoken. ii

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This paper is concerned with the transfer of sentence form from source text to target text. The data for the study are drawn from three examples of modern Italian first-person narrative, and their English translations: Stefano Bennis Margherita Dolcevita (2005) and American translator Antony Shugaars similarly titled version (2006); Niccol Ammanitis Io non ho paura (2001) and Australian translator Jonathan Hunts version, Im not scared (2003); Rosa Cappiellos Paese fortunato (1981) and Australian translator Gaetano Randos Oh Lucky Country (1984; 2003; 2009). Stefano Benni is an acclaimed contemporary Italian satirical novelist. So too is Niccol Ammaniti, though Io non ho paura is a story about innocence and criminality told through the voice of a child caught up in a violent adult world. Rosa Cappiellos work, a diaristic account of an Italian womans experiences as a migrant to Australia in the seventies, is an earlier text. Though Cappiellos work was celebrated when it was first published in Italy, it is now little known there, and the source text is out of print. But thanks to the English translation, her work has attained iconic status within the framework of migration literature in Australia, and is now the second-most translated work of a first generation Italian Australian writer (Rando, 2009: Introduction: x). It has recently emerged in a third edition in the Australian Classics Library Series. Its acclaim is in part due to post-colonialist interpretations of the work that have celebrated Rosa Cappiello in Oh Lucky Country as one of the few minority voices to have successfully challenged the dominant paradigm (Gunew,1994). Equivalence in translation is generally understood to relate to the highest strata in language organisation: those outside and above grammar itself, namely the semantic and contextual strata. However, in the view of Halliday (2001:15), the compositional hierarchy within grammar, ascending from morpheme to word to phrase to clause and to association of clauses also corresponds to a hierarchy of importance in terms of equivalence. In the framework of this rank scale he states that the value tends to go up the higher the rank: clause complex equivalence is valued more highly than clausal, clausal than phrasal and so on. 1

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Clauses or clause complexes what we are more likely to call sentences are surveyed here firstly in relation to the resources for their form in English and Italian, and to the way specific forms impact on the transmission of the message in both languages. An additional interest in this paper is in showing how divergences in sentence form in the transfer from source to target text can reflect reference to a normative framework on the part of the translator, producing a departure from the original in terms of text type. The data reveal a tendency among translators confronted by elements of sentence form that are marginally non-standard in Italian, to standardise them in English. There are numerous instances of what I have interpreted as minor repairs, or avoidance strategies in the translations as regards sentence form; these are alterations which can change the discourse focus and semantic content, and reduce the extent to which the source texts are, to varying degrees, written as if they were spoken. The punctuation systems of the two languages are central to the non-standard ST sentence structures and to the TT standardising strategies. The significant punctuation marks are:

English and Italian The primary boundary markers i. capital letter ii. full stop (.)

The secondary boundary marker i. semi-colon (;)

Lower level secondary boundary marker comma (,)

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The relevance of the implications that can be drawn from the following contrastive analysis relies on the extent to which Italian and English calibrate, to use Whorfs term. (See Carroll, J.B., (Ed.) 1956: Introduction). For the purposes of this investigation, the significant parallels between Italian and English are primarily those of the resources of sentence form and the similar functions of most of their respective segmental punctuation signs. (For Italian see Renzi, Salvi & Cardinaletti, (Eds.) 2001: vol 1; Serianni, 2010; Lepschy & Lepschy, 1988. For English I have referred to Huddlestone & Pullum (Eds.) 2002; Halliday, 2004; Peters, 2004, Burchfield, 2004.) The data were collected from a sentence-by-sentence contrastive analysis of each ST and TT pair, and are presented as a totality of sentences for each text. All the sentences are drawn sequentially from the first pages of each work: I have 212 for Cappiello, 60 for Benni, and 72 for Ammaniti. In terms of narrative and thematic development, paragraphs might have seemed an ideal unit for this study. However, the status of the paragraph as a unit in linguistic analysis is tentative; it is an extra level of complexity added to the hierarchy of the written system, and one which underscores the fact that writing is not the representation of speech sound (Halliday, 2004:7). In texts which set out to replicate some of the patterns of the speech system, we might expect the paragraph to be challenged in its role as a necessary highest level of the traditional graphological paradigm. The texts in fact occupy extremes in the scope of paragraph boundaries (though they were not chosen for that reason). A typical Cappiello paragraph is formed of up to 60 sentences. In Ammaniti paragraphs are frequently co-extensive with sentences. In Benni paragraphs may also be co-extensive with sentences; at most they are short, rarely more than five sentences. Capppiellos translator usually observes the ST paragraph length and boundaries. Both translators of Benni and Ammaniti adhere rigorously to the paragraph length and boundaries of the source texts.

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To return to the point about the sentence as the site of this contrastive analysis, it should be noted that the translations themselves are all sentence-oriented, by which I mean that they take the source text sentences as signalling the units of meaning to be transferred into the target text, even if they may change the parameters of these units. The translators may convert a simple sentence into a complex one; or reduce two source-text sentences to one; or translate one sentence with two. All this boundary shifting produces changes of meaning. However, they interpret Umberto Ecos (2004: 5) requirement that the translator be faithful to the intention of the text as beginning with the recognition of each of the autonomous units of signification of the text, in other words, each of its sentences (Greimas, 1982: sentence). Sentence form The interest in sentence form in this study is limited to the expression of finite clauses, and the term sentence form refers firstly to the syntactic resources for sentence composition: sentences may be either simple, and coextensive with a single clause, or they may be multi-clause sentences. In the case of multi-clause sentences, the term sentence form also refers to the syntactic relation between the clausesto whether they are connected through coordination or subordination. These three sentence forms represent three distinct relational structures. (A) Simple sentence ST Ero sudato.

TT I was sweaty. (B) Coordinated sentence ST Ho preso fiato e lho chiamata. TT I got my breath back and called to her.

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(C) Mainsubordinate sentence ST Perch lo chiamavano il Teschio non me lo ricordo. TT Why we called him Skull I cant remember.

Sentences (A) are in the form of a single independent, or free clause, an autonomous unit of signification expressing a single message. Sentences (B) express a relationship between two clauses of equal syntactic and semantic status. In this example, the relationship expressed by the structural marker e in Italian (and in English) is sequential and additive; the second clause develops the first; the events of the two clauses are closely integrated both in time and causally: the character needs to regain his breath before he can call his sister. Coordinates joined by e in Italian have been defined as presupposing semantically homologous clauses which pool their content (Serianni, 2010: 535, my translation); the clausecoordination is the sum of the meaning of the clause components. Sentences (C) express a relationship of syntactic inequality between a main and a dependent clause linked by the conjunction perch (English why). The dependent clause, Perch lo chiamavano il Teschio (Why they called him Skull), whose content is a segment of reported speech, is reliant for its transmission on the medium of the main clause: non me lo ricordo (I cant remember). Subordinate clauses are considered to be backgrounded relative to foregrounded main clauses, and this respective backgrounding and foregrounding often correlates, as here, with verbal tense and aspect. In the example, the subordinate clause has the backgrounded, non-eventive verb form the imperfect whereas the main clause is a foregrounded present tense: Perch lo chiamavano il Teschio

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(Chiamavano corresponds to English called in a continuative or habitual sense; therefore it could also have been translated as used to call or would call) The pooling of messages associated by time and causality which occurs in coordination such as that above as distinct from the backgrounding and foregrounding of information in the subordinate main clause complex underpins Umberto Ecos claim that the events of the two texts below (what he calls their stories) have been edited by two quite different plots, by which he means the way the events have been organised ( Eco, 2003: 27). Those plots are realised by sentence form: I hated John, so I killed him. (Coordination of clauses) Since I hated John, I killed him. (Subordinatemain clause) Although I have given examples of sentences formed exclusively from coordination of clauses or from main clausesubordinate clause nexuses, multi-cause sentences are frequently a blend of both. Such a blend is in fact typical of sentences in English (Halliday, 2004:376). Below is an example: a sentence with the form of a coordination of clauses, the second of which has a dependent (relative) clause: (D) Coordination and subordination combined Mi sono girato e lho vista sparire inghiottita dal grano che copriva la collina.
COORDINATE 1 COORDINATE 2 SUBORDINATE (RELATIVE) CLAUSE

(Pooled content)

(elaboration)

I turned and saw her disappear, swallowed up by the wheat that covered the hill.
COORDINATE 1 COORDINATE 2 SUBORDINATE( RELATIVE) CLAUSE

(Pooled content)

(elaboration)

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The source texts on the whole are characterised by a sparing use of clause addition through either form of syntactic linking, or a blend of both: two to three clauses is typical, the largest number is five. Of the three sentence forms, simple sentences are the most frequent across the data.

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This table gives the figures for sentence forms in the source and translation texts.

Cappiello Totalparagraphno:9 Totalsentences:sourcetext212targettext178 Difference:34fewersentencesintargettext Totalsimple:sourceText110targettext81 Totalcomplex:sourcetext29targettext39 Totalcoordinated:sourcetext13targettext23 Fragment:sourcetext60targettext35

Ammaniti Totalparagraphs:29 Totalsentencessourcetext72targettext75 Difference:3moresentencesintargettext Totalsimple:sourcetext39targettext40 Totalcomplex:sourcetext9targettext12 Totalcoordinated:sourcetext15targettext14 Fragment:sourcetext9targettext9

Benni Totalparagraphs:20 Totalsentences:sourcetext60targettext70 Difference:10moresentencesintargettext Totalsimple:sourcetext20targettext26 Totalcomplex:sourcetext16targettext21 Totalcoordinated:sourcetext17targettext16 8 Fragment:Sourcetext7targettext7

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It is a simple table of relative frequency, whose main immediate significance is in overall increases or reductions of a particular sentence form. The table does not document the translation outcome for each sentence and so it doesnt follow from it, for instance, that the seven sentence fragments in Bennis source text are translations of the same the seven fragments in the target text, though they almost certainly are a close match-up. For this paper I have chosen to explore some of what lies behind the following source-text translation-text variation in Benni and Ammaniti. Benni Totalsentences:sourcetext60targettext70 Difference:10moresentencesintargettext Totalsimple:sourcetext20targettext26

Ammaniti

Totalsentencessourcetext72targettext75 Difference:3moresentencesintargettext Totalsimple:sourcetext39targettext40

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Normative frameworks in translation practice This study is also interested in forms of sentence which are outside the three grammatical paradigms described above. And in the way they have been translated. One of these is the sentence consisting of a loose association of clauses whose linkage is represented by commas. Occurrence of this sentence form is restricted to the ST. Below is one example from Cappiello. The clauses are underlined: ST Le pareti di legno son rialzate dal suolo di una ventina di centimetri, salendo sulle sedie si spia lintimit delle vicine. TT The wooden partitions were raised some twenty centimetres from the floor and by standing on a chair you could spy on your neighbours in their most intimate moments.

The ST sentence is asymmetrical; it lacks the requisite semantic and syntactic parallel structure to qualify as a central case of coordination. This becomes obvious when it is tested against the reversibility criterion. The hallmark of central cases of coordination is that they can be reversed without significant change to their structure and meaning, as in the example below: In ogni casa ci sono ... e la cantina oscura che spaventa e attrae noi bambini. Every house has and a dark cellar to frightenand attractus kids. This could just as easily be reversed: In ogni casa ci sono ... e la cantina oscura che attrae e spaventa noi bambini. Every house has and a dark cellar to attractfrighten us kids. Returning to the earlier example, we see that the coordinates cannot be reversed because the meaning of the second depends upon the first, which anchors it referentially to thematic element of the pareti di legno wooden partitions. 10

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Le pareti di legno son rialzate dal suolo di una ventina di centimetri, salendo sulle sedie si spia lintimit delle vicine. The wooden partitions were raised some twenty centimetres from the floor and by standing on a chair you could spy on your neighbours in their most intimate moments. Reversal of coordinates *Salendo sulle sedie si spia lintimit delle vicine, le pareti di legno son rialzate dal suolo di una ventina di centimetri. *By standing on a chair you could spy on your neighbours in their most intimate moments, and the wooden partitions were raised some twenty centimetres from the floor. In the source text the asymmetrical coordinates are joined by commas only, in a form of coordination known as asyndetic. The commas used asyndetically correspond to what would be a realised as a pause in speech (Renzi, 2001: 247) Instead of using asyndetic coordination in the target text, the translator has used the structural coordinator and. Asyndetic coordination is less common in English than coordination marked by structural coordinators such as e, and, but that is probably not why the translator chose the latter. The coordinator marks a stronger connection between the coordinates than does the comma, and connectedness (as per the paradigms we have been discussing) is exactly what these two coordinates do not have. By using and, the translator has made a minor repair in the target text version of the original coordination more a type of cover-up of what he must have perceived as a grammatical fault . And has a clearly additive function, it makes the relationship of the two coordinates explicit, and the assymetrical structure of the second coordinate less noticeable. Compare the syndetic and asyndetic alternatives for this coordination in English:

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Syndetic coordination The wooden partitions were raised some twenty centimetres from the floor and by standing on a chair you could spy on your neighbours in their most intimate moments. Asyndetic coordination The wooden partitions were raised some twenty centimetres from the floor, by standing on a chair you could spy on your neighbours in their most intimate moments. The asyndetic realisation in English, from a prescriptive point of view, would be considered flawed: There is a structural resemblance between asyndetic coordination and the solecism referred to in English as comma splice. Comma splice is the joining of sentences with commas, as if they were clauses that could be grammatically linked by asyndetic coordination; but they cant be, because the relationship between the clauses is unclear. At the same time as they identify comma splice as a fault, prescriptive usage manuals acknowledge its place in some literary works that are valued artefacts (Peters, 2004:116; Burchfield, 2004: 623). Loose associations of clauses of the type we have been analysing, whose literal translation would produce comma-spliced sentences in English, occur in all three original texts. In Italian they would fall into the category of anacoluto, a term which derives from the Greek and means something that does not follow; the category of anacoluto cover breaks in syntactic sequencing, irregularity in sentence structure, and, under a more contemporary interpretation, a change of direction in discourse structure (Serianni, 2010: anacoluto: 534, my translation.) The value of such a concept is, of course, relative to text type: Seriani notes that while such structures would be inappropriate in upper register text type, they are not so in informal register, or in literary texts that seek to capture features of spoken discourse.

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These loosely associated clauses are subject to varying strategies of standardisation by their translators, of which the most common is the realisation of such pseudo-coordinates as autonomous sentences. The findings of the data are the first pointer to this: the translation of Bennis text has ten more sentences than the original, and six more simple sentences.

Benni Totalsentences:sourcetext:60targettext:70 Difference:10moresentencesintargettext Totalsimplesentences:tourcetext:20targettext:26

This increase in sentence number and in the tokens of simple sentences can be largely accounted for by the translators re-defining the syntactic boundaries of sentences such as the one below. It is formed of three pseudo-coordinates (underlined) attached to the end of a maindependent clause structure: ST Pisolo il mio cancatalogo, perch pi che un incrocio veramente un catalogo di tutte le razze canine e animali e forse vegetali apparse sulla Terra, mi fanno ridere gli esperimenti sul diennea e le clonazioni, Pisolo pi complicato, uno dei pi misteriosi arcimboldi della natura. In the translation these are realised as three separate simple sentences. TT Sleepy is my catadogue, so called because he is not so much a mongrel as he is a genuine catalogue of every breed of dog and species of animal (and possibly plant) that has ever lived on planet Earth. I have to laugh when I read about experiments with DNA and cloning. Sleepy is more complicated than that. He is a genuine arcimboldo, one of natures most mysterious contrivances.

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A further example below shows how the standardising of ST pseudo-coordinates may result in added syntactic and semantic parallelism in the translation. In this example, the new TT sentence boundaries correlate with semantic domain and with negative versus positive within the system of polarity; there is no such semantic symmetry in the original: ST Ma Pisolo non una metafora, carne, pelo e avorio, ha sentimenti e ricordi. TT But Sleepy isnt a metaphor. He is flesh and blood and ivory; he has feelings and memories. The first TT clause is abstract and negative and is framed in a free-standing sentence: But Sleepy isnt a metaphor. The second and third clauses are positive within the system of polarity and have in common that they are all properties of Pisolo; the sentence boundary marks that semantic congruity as a syntactic unit, while within the sentence the semi-colon further divides the clauses along the domain lines of physical and psychological: He is flesh and blood and ivory; he has feelings and memories. The sentence division of the TT text produces greater salience than the three-clause source text coordination. The unitary nature of a simple sentence foregrounds a unitary message whereas the message of the coordination, as was noted earlier, is the sum of the message of the coordinates. Add to this the fact that in the second sentence the subject-prominent character of English sentence structure is fully exhibited in virtue of the use of the semi-colon as a coordinating punctuation sign: He is flesh and blood and ivory; he has feelings and memories. If the coordination had been linked by the structural coordinator and, there would have been ellipsis of the pronoun he: 14

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He is flesh and blood and ivory and has feelings and memories. Contrast this salience with the effect of pronoun-drop in Italian, where the pronoun is retrieved from the verb ending with reference to the verb-initial subject, highlighted below: Ma Pisolo non una metafora, carne, pelo e avorio, ha sentimenti e ricordi. There is another point to be made about this text, relating to the semi colon and text type. In their discussion of the status of punctuation rules Huddlestone et al. (2002:1727) make the following comment: ... we do not find social variation between standard and non-standard [uses of punctuation] such as we
have in grammar: there is no punctuational counterpart of grammatically non-standard usage like I aint done nothing ... that is a repertory of variants that are used in a consistent way by one social group but not by another.

But there does seem to be a punctuational counterpart to formal register in their account and it is the semicolon to which is ascribed the function of separating clauses of complex structure and content. In its role of dividing such complex coordinates it is described as belonging to a formal register. It should be noted that the semicolon has similar roles in Italian. The resistance to linking pseudo-coordinations with commas is not confined to Bennis translator. Of the three translators, Jonathan Hunt adhers most closely to the syntactic structure of the original: the data show an increase of only three sentences overall relative to the source text, and only one more simple sentence. Significantly, when we explore the data we find that additional simple sentence was generated by the same strategy as used by Shugaar in the face of the same perceived problem: Non dovevo portarmela dietro, mamma me lavrebbe fatta pagare cara. I shouldnt have brought her along. Mama would be furious with me. 15

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In discussing the punctuation of these source texts we cannot overlook the fact that all three of them are first person narratives; one narrator is a child, one an adolescent. The only adult narrator is an avowed iconoclast where dominant structures, including linguistic ones, are concerned. All three texts attempt to replicate the structure of spoken discourse, and I am suggesting here that the loose associations of clauses and linking commas where the commas correspond to the pauses in speech are motivated by a sense of the incommensurability of the written sentence and the spoken utterance, and the difficulties of segmenting speech (Sornicola 1982: 1325). This paper has sought to highlight the importance of sentence form in general, but also to turn attention to the way punctuation and text type are connected. It suggests that non-standard source text sentence structures are almost certainly not solecisms but symbols which interrogate the texts relation to the spoken as well as the written systems. They should not be lost in translation.

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References

Ammaniti, N. (2001). Io non ho paura. Torino: Einaudi. Ammaniti, N. (2003). Im not scared. trans. Jonathan Hunt, Melbourne: Text Publishing. Benni, S. (2005). Margherita DolceVita. Milan: Feltrinelli. Benni, S. (2006). Margherita Dolce Vita. trans. Antony Shugaar, New York: Europa Editions. Burchfield, R.W. (2004) Fowlers Modern English Usage: Oxford. Carroll, J.B. (1956) (Ed.) Language, Thought and Reality: Selected Writings of Benjamin Lee Whorf. Cambridge, Mass.: MIT Press. Cappiello, R. (1981). Paese fortunato. Milan: Feltrinelli. Cappiello, R. (2009) Oh Lucky Country. trans. Gaetano Rando, Sydney: Sydney University Press. Eco, U. (2003)MouseorRat?London:Weidenfeld&Nicholson. Gunew, S.(1994) The Grotesque Migrant Body: Rosa Cappiellos Oh Lucky Country. In Framing Marginality: Multicultural Literary Studies. Melbourne: Melbourne University Press. Greimas, A.J. & Cortes, J. (1982) Semiotics and Language: An Analytical Dictionary. Bloomington: Indiana University Press. Halliday, M.A.K. (2001) Towards a Theory of Good Translation. In E. Steiner and C. Yallop (Eds.) Exploring Translation and Multilingual Text Production: Beyond Content. Berlin, New York: Mouton de Gruyter. Halliday, M.A.K. & Matthiesson, C. (2004), An Introduction to Functional Grammar. 3rd edition: London: Arnold. 17

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Huddleston R. & Pullum, G. (2002), (Eds.) The Cambridge Grammar of the English Language. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Lepschy, A. & Lepschy, G. (1988) The Italian Language Today. London: Routledge. Peters, P. (2004) The Cambridge Guide to English Usage. Cambridge University Press. Renzi, L., Salvi, G. & Cardinaletti, A. (2001) (Eds.) Grande grammatica di consultazione. Vol. 1, 2nd edition Bologna: ll Mulino. Serianni, L. (2010) Grammatica italiana. 2nd edition, Novara: De Agostini Scuola. Sornicola, R. (1981) Sul parlato. Bologna: Il Mulino. Wallace, S., (1982) Figure and Ground. In (Ed.) Hopper, P., Tense and Aspect: Between Semantics and Pragmatics, Benjamins Publishing Company.

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