(UN)TRANSLATABLENESS OF LITERARY TEXTS OR HOW TO TRANSLATE THE UNTRANSLATABLE
Tatiana PORUMB, Università Statale della Moldova
Abstract
The proposed study is aimed at analyzing the difficulties of translating literary texts from Italian into Romanian
in a historical-linguistic and philological-literary perspective, the investigation focusing mainly on the analysis of
lexical and stylistic data found in the target texts, but also on the testimonies of the translators themselves. Since the
linguistic and life biographies of Italian authors are characterized by a strong connection between culturemes, often
expressed through images attributable to their culture, history and dialect specific to each Italian region in part, their
texts are loaded with unique linguistic and stylistic expressions, realized in particular at the lexical, syntactic and
semantic level that transmit the personal sensitivity of the author. The transformations thus obtained produce hybrid
models of thought and identity that are difficult to translate into another foreign language. The comparison with a
further linguistic and cultural dimension presupposes the translator’s skills and competences that go beyond the requirement to be bilingual and bicultural. From this perspective, we intend to analyse the translation strategies used in
the transposition of some texts from Italian to Romanian in order to examine whether and how the linguistic-stylistic
peculiarities representing the Italian cultural and dialectal identity of these authors have been preserved.
Keywords: untranslatability, transposition, idiolect, puns, dialects, cultureme, rhythm, emotional experience.
