The Distribution of Information in LSP Translation. A Corpus Study of Italian

In LSP translating the production of naturally-sounding, idiomatic target texts is often taken to mean special attention in the use of terminology. However, research in distribution of the elements of the message in different languages shows that the representation of the information structure is language-specific and that there are language-specific focus-attributing positions within the syntactic structure of sentences. In this paper, features of information structure and focus-attributing positions will be studied in a corpus of English-Italian translations of popular physics articles and compared with a corpus of original Italian articles on the same topic to see if the Italian information structure is used in translation or whether target texts reproduce the original English information structure. Results show that translations use – at least to a certain extent – the original English information structure, therefore making target texts sound partly unnatural. A number of revision strategies are proposed to reinstate a more typical Italian information structure in order to ensure that the informational value of sentence elements is preserved and higher-quality LSP translations are produced.