From Italy to China through Elena Ferrante’s My Brilliant Friend. How are Italian cultural references translated into Chinese?

This paper seeks to describe, from a translating perspective, the introduction in the People’s Republic of China (PRC) of the Italian cultural specificity characterizing the quadrilogy L’amica geniale (My Brilliant Friend, 2011-2014) by the Italian author Elena Ferrante. The international wave of success gained by the quadrilogy attained with no exception even in China, where My Brilliant Friend is today one of the most read Italian novels. Representative of a particular place and historical period, its narrative is dense with a heavy cultural load that shape the strong regional connotation of the novel: through a systematic categorization of the cultural references retrieved in the first volume of the quadrilogy and the recognition and classification of the correspondent translation strategies adopted, this paper seeks therefore to preliminarily describe how has Italian culture been rendered into Chinese.