A corpus-assisted study of PARERE/SEMBRARE in Grazia Deledda’s Canne al Vento and La Madre. Constructing point of view in the Source Texts and their English translations.

Recent studies of literature in translation (e.g. Bosseaux 2007, Munday 2008) have addressed the issue of the discursive presence of translators in representing point of view, defined as “the psychological perspective through which a story is told” (Simpson 1993: 4-5), with the aim of assessing the effectiveness of the translation strategies used in conveying the point of view in the original text. The linguistic markers indicative of the different planes of point of view (as described by Uspensky 1973, Fowler 1986, Simpson 1993) may be collected as quantitative data for a subsequent qualitative analysis. The present study concerns the work of the nineteenth-century Italian writer Grazia Deledda and the English translations of her novels Canne al Vento and La Madre in particular. It focuses on the examination of certain key n grams which as part of a previous study (Johnson 2009) were extracted from a corpus of Deledda’s work in the original Italian in comparison with a reference corpus of nineteenth-century Italian literature. The keyness in the n grams of word forms of the lemmas PARERE/SEMBRARE [seem or appear] seemed to confirm existing literary findings regarding Deledda’s work which claim that particular focus is placed on the perception of reality (e.g. Dolfi 1979: 61), but it was also hypothesised that this frequency creates a certain type of alignment between the reader and the characters in the narrative, leading to the definition of a particular point of view. This article reports a qualitative investigation of the strategies used to translate particularly frequent clusters containing word forms of the two lemmas in the English translations, with the aim of assessing to what extent the translation choices convey the point of view perceived by the reader as expressed in the narrative structure of the Source Text. It was found that, whereas particular clusters in Deledda’s novels may be interpreted as being related to a certain point of view in the source text, their corresponding translations, while being equivalent and satisfying solutions at the semantic level, did not always fully attribute that same point of view and in one novel in particular, the cumulative data suggested that there was a slight shift in point of view away from that of reflector characters to that of the narrator. References Bosseaux C., 2007, How does it feel? Point of view in translation, Amsterdam/NY, Rodopi Dolfi A., 1979, Grazia Deledda, Mursia, Milano Fowler R., 1986, 2nd ed 1996, Linguistic Criticism, Oxford, Oxford University Press Johnson J.H., 2009, "Towards an identification of the authorial style of Grazia Deledda. A corpus-assisted study" (Occasional Papers dei Quaderni del CeSLiC published online: http://amsacta.cib.unibo.it/archive/00002678/) Munday J., 2008, Style and Ideology in Translation, Abingdon, Routledge Simpson P., 1993, Language, Ideology and Point of View, London, Routledge Uspensky B., 1973, A Poetics of Composition, Berkeley, University of California Press