Maria Teresa Musacchio | Università degli Studi di Padova (original) (raw)

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Papers by Maria Teresa Musacchio

From a contrastive perspective, Italian is often said to make more extensive use of connectives a... more From a contrastive perspective, Italian is often said to make more extensive use of connectives and other text-organizing elements than English. Little empirical support exists for such a claim and vague references are made in the literature to possible differences in the way text-organizing elements are used in Italian translated and non-translated texts. In specialist translation, adding text-organizing elements to a translated text may entail the risk of making explicit the wrong kind of coherence relation between two source-text sections (e.g. two juxtaposed sentences). Our paper explores the use of intersentential connectives in a corpus of Italian translated texts in economics, comparing these both with the English source texts and with comparable Italian non-translated texts. The analysis shows that the frequency of connectives is, overall, higher in the non-translated than in the translated texts; in the translated texts, a connective is often ‘added’ to the text, i.e. it ha...

Although the learners are in a language learning situation, the authenticity of the teaching mate... more Although the learners are in a language learning situation, the authenticity of the teaching material, the tasks, and the scenarios means that they can behave as they would in similar situations in their personal lives. 1.1 Task Types used in the EXPLICS products Depending on the aims, content and structure of the language course in which the products will be used different task based approaches can be adopted: Global simulation: When using a global simulation, the whole class is invited to create a fictitious world within a given context (e.g. an apartment block, a village, a company or a conference), to invent the characters living in this fictitious world and to make them interact. A global simulation can constitute a language course in itself at any level of competence, since it is possible to include any language items and skills in the global simulation itself. Global simulations are particularly suited for language tasks that require: brain storming, fact-finding, exploring and problem solving.

A note on the life and terms of Enrico Fermi "Nam tibi de summa caeli ratione deumque disserere i... more A note on the life and terms of Enrico Fermi "Nam tibi de summa caeli ratione deumque disserere incipiam et rerum primordia pandam, unde omnis natura creet res, auctet alatque, quove eadem rursum natura perempta resolvat, quae nos materiem et genitalia corpora rebus reddunda in ratione vocare et semina rerum appellare suemus et haec eadem usurpare corpora prima, quod ex illis sunt omnia primis." (Lucretius, De Rerum Natura, I, 54-61) 1

Translation and Localization

In LSP translating the production of naturally-sounding, idiomatic target texts is often taken to... more 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 the 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 will show that translations use – at least to a certain extent – the original English information structure, therefore making target texts sound partly unnatural. A number...

Lingue e Linguaggi, 2019

Over the centuries, the circulation of scientific ideas has been granted in one or a limited numb... more Over the centuries, the circulation of scientific ideas has been granted in one or a limited number of languages. Despite the advantages of avoiding a scientific Babel, popular science is largely communicated to the public using their first language(s), and is often the result of translation from other languages – most notably English. While science may partly be communicated to the public for information, at the leading edge of research it is often popularised for its newsworthiness and/or to involve the public in debates concerning social issues or political decisions. The question addressed in this paper is how the ‘news’ elements in popular science are mediated in the target language and culture and to what extent processes such as rewriting, transediting and transcreation are at work. Methods and strategies for science communication are compared and contrasted using an Italian and English parallel/comparable corpus of newspaper, magazine and news agency articles reporting on th...

The paper presents a corpus-based study aimed at an analysis of ontological and terminological co... more The paper presents a corpus-based study aimed at an analysis of ontological and terminological commitments in the discourse of specialist communities. The analyzed corpus contains the lectures delivered by the Nobel Prize winners in Physics and Economics. The analysis focuses on (a) the collocational use of automatically identified domain-specific terms and (b) a description of metadiscourse in the lectures. Candidate terms are extracted based on the z-score of frequency and weirdness. Compounds comprising these candidate terms are then identified using the ontology representation system Protégé. This method is then replicated to complete analysis by including an investigation of metadiscourse markers signalling how writers project themselves into their work.

This paper describes how methods and techniques developed in corpus linguistics can be used to co... more This paper describes how methods and techniques developed in corpus linguistics can be used to compare and contrast samples of language use over time and across genres. A diachronic Italian corpus of nuclear physics texts belonging to different genres is collected, organised, and analysed to demonstrate the use of language in shaping one of the key sciences of the 20 century.

Lo studio si propone di analizzare la traduzione di una particolare categoria di elementi coesivi... more Lo studio si propone di analizzare la traduzione di una particolare categoria di elementi coesivi, i connettori interfrasali, in un corpus di articoli di argomento economico tratti da quotidiani e riviste specializzate tradotti dall’inglese in italiano. Lo studio mette in rapporto i risultati sulla frequenza dei connettori con quelli derivanti dall’analisi di un corpus comparabile di articoli scritti originariamente in italiano. Soffermandosi in particolare sui casi di esplicitazione traduttiva tramite l’inserimento di connettori non presenti nel testo di partenza, lo studio conclude che tale esplicitazione può, da un lato, essere collegata al tentativo dei traduttori di uniformarsi a una norma di produzione testuale tipica dell’italiano e, dall’altro, essere considerata come spia del processo di decodifica dell’informazione (spesso di carattere specialistico) veicolata dall’originale.

Explorations and Applications, 2004

Being changed: the …, 1994

Page 300. JEAN-GUY GOULET AND DAVID YOUNG Theoretical and Methodological Issues INTRODUCTION In t... more Page 300. JEAN-GUY GOULET AND DAVID YOUNG Theoretical and Methodological Issues INTRODUCTION In their search for knowledge, anthropologists who used to won-der about how their presence might affect the societies ...

From a contrastive perspective, Italian is often said to make more extensive use of connectives a... more From a contrastive perspective, Italian is often said to make more extensive use of connectives and other text-organizing elements than English. Little empirical support exists for such a claim and vague references are made in the literature to possible differences in the way text-organizing elements are used in Italian translated and non-translated texts. In specialist translation, adding text-organizing elements to a translated text may entail the risk of making explicit the wrong kind of coherence relation between two source-text sections (e.g. two juxtaposed sentences). Our paper explores the use of intersentential connectives in a corpus of Italian translated texts in economics, comparing these both with the English source texts and with comparable Italian non-translated texts. The analysis shows that the frequency of connectives is, overall, higher in the non-translated than in the translated texts; in the translated texts, a connective is often ‘added’ to the text, i.e. it ha...

Although the learners are in a language learning situation, the authenticity of the teaching mate... more Although the learners are in a language learning situation, the authenticity of the teaching material, the tasks, and the scenarios means that they can behave as they would in similar situations in their personal lives. 1.1 Task Types used in the EXPLICS products Depending on the aims, content and structure of the language course in which the products will be used different task based approaches can be adopted: Global simulation: When using a global simulation, the whole class is invited to create a fictitious world within a given context (e.g. an apartment block, a village, a company or a conference), to invent the characters living in this fictitious world and to make them interact. A global simulation can constitute a language course in itself at any level of competence, since it is possible to include any language items and skills in the global simulation itself. Global simulations are particularly suited for language tasks that require: brain storming, fact-finding, exploring and problem solving.

A note on the life and terms of Enrico Fermi "Nam tibi de summa caeli ratione deumque disserere i... more A note on the life and terms of Enrico Fermi "Nam tibi de summa caeli ratione deumque disserere incipiam et rerum primordia pandam, unde omnis natura creet res, auctet alatque, quove eadem rursum natura perempta resolvat, quae nos materiem et genitalia corpora rebus reddunda in ratione vocare et semina rerum appellare suemus et haec eadem usurpare corpora prima, quod ex illis sunt omnia primis." (Lucretius, De Rerum Natura, I, 54-61) 1

Translation and Localization

In LSP translating the production of naturally-sounding, idiomatic target texts is often taken to... more 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 the 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 will show that translations use – at least to a certain extent – the original English information structure, therefore making target texts sound partly unnatural. A number...

Lingue e Linguaggi, 2019

Over the centuries, the circulation of scientific ideas has been granted in one or a limited numb... more Over the centuries, the circulation of scientific ideas has been granted in one or a limited number of languages. Despite the advantages of avoiding a scientific Babel, popular science is largely communicated to the public using their first language(s), and is often the result of translation from other languages – most notably English. While science may partly be communicated to the public for information, at the leading edge of research it is often popularised for its newsworthiness and/or to involve the public in debates concerning social issues or political decisions. The question addressed in this paper is how the ‘news’ elements in popular science are mediated in the target language and culture and to what extent processes such as rewriting, transediting and transcreation are at work. Methods and strategies for science communication are compared and contrasted using an Italian and English parallel/comparable corpus of newspaper, magazine and news agency articles reporting on th...

The paper presents a corpus-based study aimed at an analysis of ontological and terminological co... more The paper presents a corpus-based study aimed at an analysis of ontological and terminological commitments in the discourse of specialist communities. The analyzed corpus contains the lectures delivered by the Nobel Prize winners in Physics and Economics. The analysis focuses on (a) the collocational use of automatically identified domain-specific terms and (b) a description of metadiscourse in the lectures. Candidate terms are extracted based on the z-score of frequency and weirdness. Compounds comprising these candidate terms are then identified using the ontology representation system Protégé. This method is then replicated to complete analysis by including an investigation of metadiscourse markers signalling how writers project themselves into their work.

This paper describes how methods and techniques developed in corpus linguistics can be used to co... more This paper describes how methods and techniques developed in corpus linguistics can be used to compare and contrast samples of language use over time and across genres. A diachronic Italian corpus of nuclear physics texts belonging to different genres is collected, organised, and analysed to demonstrate the use of language in shaping one of the key sciences of the 20 century.

Lo studio si propone di analizzare la traduzione di una particolare categoria di elementi coesivi... more Lo studio si propone di analizzare la traduzione di una particolare categoria di elementi coesivi, i connettori interfrasali, in un corpus di articoli di argomento economico tratti da quotidiani e riviste specializzate tradotti dall’inglese in italiano. Lo studio mette in rapporto i risultati sulla frequenza dei connettori con quelli derivanti dall’analisi di un corpus comparabile di articoli scritti originariamente in italiano. Soffermandosi in particolare sui casi di esplicitazione traduttiva tramite l’inserimento di connettori non presenti nel testo di partenza, lo studio conclude che tale esplicitazione può, da un lato, essere collegata al tentativo dei traduttori di uniformarsi a una norma di produzione testuale tipica dell’italiano e, dall’altro, essere considerata come spia del processo di decodifica dell’informazione (spesso di carattere specialistico) veicolata dall’originale.

Explorations and Applications, 2004

Being changed: the …, 1994

Page 300. JEAN-GUY GOULET AND DAVID YOUNG Theoretical and Methodological Issues INTRODUCTION In t... more Page 300. JEAN-GUY GOULET AND DAVID YOUNG Theoretical and Methodological Issues INTRODUCTION In their search for knowledge, anthropologists who used to won-der about how their presence might affect the societies ...