Distanza intertestuale e lingua fonte: analisi di un corpus giornalistico

This chapter illustrates the results of a revised method for calculating the intertextual distance between newspaper articles originally written in Italian and translated from other languages. Starting from the theoretical background provided by the translation universals hypothesis, we have used five different parsing and token-selection criteria to check whether intertextual distance measures can distinguish native texts from translations and group together texts translated from the same source language. Although the combined impact of several factors (source language, contents, author and translator) needs to be taken into account, results show that translations tend to be mutually closer, while intertextual distance measures are greater between translations and non-translated texts (and vice versa). In addition, although the distinction is not as clear-cut, translations from the same language tend to group together since they are intertextually closer than translations from other source languages. However, further research is necessary to explain the erratic results obtained when we have used grammar words to calculate the intertextual distance.