Bilinguismo e traduzione. Creazione di corpora paralleli per l’analisi delle traduzioni letterarie del concorso Kul’turnyj most

This paper presents the experience of corpus-based analysis of the open access Russian-Italian translations of literary texts by heritage speakers (HS), which was realized on the SE (Sketch Engine) platform to identify the different levels of translation difficulties encountered when comparing the two language systems. While participating as jury member in the Kul'turnyj Most (‘Cultural Bridge’) contest, held in Italy from 2018 to 2021, I gathered very rich material for the creation of parallel corpora. This experience shows that natural translation, which plays a major role in the acquisition of bilingualism, is insufficient for the development of bilingual translation competence. The attention paid to the examination of certain types of translation errors allowed us to trace an outline of the translation weaknesses of HS as natural Russian-Italian translators.