Translation Analysis with Focus on Lexical Strategies: The Italian Translation of Realia in the Opera Os Sertões, by Euclides da Cunha

Abstract

In the field of translation sciences, realia have long aroused the interest of researchers, because there are words that don’t have correspondence in another culture because of their cultural specificity. This is the subject of this thesis: a study of the realia present in the portuguese book Os Sertões, by Euclides da Cunha and its italian translation, through the identification of a taxonomy for culture-specific words and the identification of the translation techniques adopted in the italian text. It is known that Os Sertões, in addition to dealing with an important historical theme, represents the maximum expression brazilian literature and is also a lexically rich work in the profusion of cultural words belonging to the specific brazilian reality. The comparative analysis of euclidian realia finds support in the translation studies of Corpus Linguistics with the support of the software WordSmith Tools, both for the manipulation of the corpus and for the identification, selection, collection and classification of realia. This study aims to raise the enormous possibilities that translation practice can encounter in Corpus Linguistics by favoring not only the creation of bilingual linguistic repertoires in the portuguese-italian linguistic combination but also the literary dissemination of brazilian literature.