SUMMARY

The second chapter of the thesis is focused on a particular aspect of the translation area, more
exactly, the translation of the dialect, but also on the difficulties that the translator has to deal with
while translating the novel written by the italian writer Dacia Maraini, called “La lunga vita di
Marianna Ucrìa”. The book became very popular in Italy and was translated in many languages,
such as English, Spanish, French, German and also Romanian. Since the writer comes from a region
in the south of Italy, more exactly, from Sicily, the novel contains many Sicilian dialects, words, but
also ways of saying that are typical of the Sicilian area. This aspect is what makes the translation
more particular but also more complicated.

The romanian version, named “Lunga viață a Mariannei Ucrìa”, was translated by Gabriela
Lungu. Since the beginning, the main problem the translator had to deal with, was the translation of
the Sicilian words into Romanian. This feature is linked to a cultural aspect, since there are southern
regions in Italy where the dialect is spoken most of the times, and the translator wanted to mantain
this chronotype in every little detail. For this reason, Gabriela Lungu didn’t translate the Sicilian
words in the text, but she decided to just add a footnote with their meaning in standard Italian and
then translate them into Romanian. The whole process was not an easy one, as Lungu said in an
interview. She first had to ask her friends in Italy for help and then, she made a list with all the
unknown words and sent it to Dacia Maraini. The fact that the writer makes use of the Sicilian
dialect very frequently in her novel, means that she wants to give the readers a cultural portrait of
Sicily, and not only the story of Marianna’s life, a girl that became deaf and dumb because of a
shocking scene she saw when she was little. This is the purpose of the author by using the Sicilian
dialect, it’s a way to describe, at the same time, every single feature of the Sicilian life in 1700, the
habits, the people and the mentality.

Gabriela Lungu wants to transmit the same image to the audience, that’s why she thinks it’s the
right step not to translate the Sicilian words and proverbs straight into Romanian, but to let the
readers come across the original, and eventually to inform themselves thanks to the footnotes at the
bottom of the pages. Besides the many difficulties that a translator has to face, such as false friends,
proverbs and words from a specific field, in this novel, the difficulty grows page after page, since
the translation requires much more than the knowledge of the two languages, but also a long
research from a cultural point of view.