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Appunti orale inglese ILT. Discourse analysis. Language studies are made of: discourse analysis and translation analysis. We study languages not only to get a job or to work as a translator, but mainly to understand other people, to communicate. To learn a language better, we need to know language studies. Example: “can”/”might”. We know both words, but we have to know when to use them. Their meaning is slightly different, in fact “might” is a more polite word. So, to know how to use words and expressions in different situations, we need to know language studies. Before 1970, language was considered as an abstract system: we could study grammar but the spoken language wasn't taken into consideration. After 1970, something changed thanks to Henry Widdowson: he started to considerate the use of the language. We use different types of languages according to the different situations, we change our language according to the person we're talking to (a friend, a teacher, …). The use of language is very important for us because everytime we speak, we work with words and we need to know how they can be used to communicate with other people and understand them. Translation studies → are a part of language studies, they developed in the second half of the 20th century. Notion of communicative competence (Hymes) : communicative translation is a kind of translation which tells us just something about the source text, just the important things. So, we don't need to translate every word but just the message it wants to express. We learn to communicate, when to speak, when to interrupt → we learn how to behave in different contexts according to the culture. According to Nida, the role of translation is to make it easier to transfer the meaning and the cultural elements of a message from one language into another. The meaning of an expression also depends on the way in which we say it in the target language. The communicative translation (study of translation) is very important in a post- modern world, in which the exchanges between cultures and their integrations is becoming increasingly frequent. The translations of culture-bound and idiomatic expressions is a great challeng for translators: the translator doesn't only translate the source language into a target one, but he also has to “translate” the culture of the ST into the TT. So it is very important for translators to have a strong cultural background. Translation loss → we always have translation loss when we translate. Sometimes when we translate a text with particular features, we can have some loss of
semantic meaning or structural feature in the target text. Example → a poem. If we have to respect rhythm, alliterations and structural features, we may lose the exact meaning of the source text. Disciplines of discourse analysis: - Ethnography of speaking;
- Pragmatics;
- Conversational analysis; - Interactional sociolinguistics; - Critical discourse analysis. Ethnography of speaking: This discipline, which was inaugurated by Hymes during the 1970s:
- develops some of the fundamental notions of anthropology
- analyses language as it is used in real contexts by real speakers
- tries to identify the various components of a speech event. Observation is the main methodology of this analysis, which implies regular contacts between the observer and the community s/he wants to study, participation in the life of that particular community and a natural setting. Aim: not just to collect data but also to understand a particular way of life and language use as group memebers understand them themselves. Levinson -> ethnography of speaking is the cross-cultural study of language usage, or, the study of how to use language in a contectually appropriate way, as Hymes suggests. In order to understand the communicative competence of particular users of language, that is the rules of speaking which are operative in a particular lanvuage-using communities, ethnographers of speaking identify three relevant units:
- the speech situation -> social context (when we talk about football, the register we use is different from the one we use while talking about politics.)
- the speech event -> determined by the use of language and involves activities which could not occur except in and through language, such as argument or gossip
- the speech act -> for example: greeting, apologising, etc. It's determined by the framework SPEAKING: Setting: time and space. We must know where we are and in what time. Something may be common in our days and country but it may be strange in others. Participants: who, role. (speaker/sender; audience/reciever) Ends: purpose Act sequence: what speech acts and what order Key: tone (serious, joking, etc.) Intstrumentalities: channel or medium (face to face conversation, email, etc.) Norms of interaction: the rules for producing and interpreting speech acts Genres: type of structure chosen by communities. This kind of analysis can be applied to more or less mundane genres and its primary
activities or is asking the interlocutor to stop doing something. Intonation: it's one of the most important devices used to interpretate an utterance or express ourselves better. It can be reproduced in written language only partially (for example: punctuation). It helps disambiguate a message and convey meaning. Intonation represents a contextualisation cue about the way a speaker intends hearers to treat his/her message. It expresses some aspect of the speech function, it has to do with certaingy or doubt and the contrasts it expresses are closely tied to other grammar systems such as modality. We have two main tones, rising and falling, and a combination of them. The tone group is a phonological unit consisting of a sequence of rhythmic units (feet) representing what we could call a quantum of the message, it contains a tonic and a tone and indicates the way the speaker is organising the units. One tone group is the expression of one unit of information (given or new information) and the tonic prominence marks the culmination of what is new, enabling the speaker to create meaning.
- referring tone: rise, fall-rise. It indicates shared knowledge
- proclaming tone: fall, rise-fall. It indicates new information.
- level tone: the speaker is orienting more towards the language of the utterance itself. [Coulthard] Key, or pitch level, is another choice. High key is mainly contrastive, low key equative, it indicates equivalence and mid key is additive, that is, it adds information. Grice: To interpret a particular speech act accomplished through speaking, we have to decode properly the implicature, that is the meaning which is inferred by listeners in an utterances in which a lot more is communicated than what is actually said. Tautologies: sentences such as "boys will be bows" or "a hamburger is a hamburger" -> from a logical perspective they don't have any communicative value since they express something obvious, but if they're used in conversation, they show the speaker's intention to communicate more than what is actually said. To be successful, collaboration is fundamental. Cooperative principle: it enables speakers to interpret the additional meaning conveyed by implicatures and which the listener has to work out on the basis of what s/he already knows. This principle of cooperation is articulated in four maxims:
- The Maxim of Quantity: - Make your contribution as informative as is required; - Do not make your contribution more informative than is required.
- The Maxim of Quality: - Do not say what you believe to be false; - Do not say that for which you lack adequate evidence.
- The Maxim of Relation: - Be relevant.
- The Maxim of Manner: - Avoid obscurity of expression; - Avoid ambiguity; - Be brief; - Be orderly (avoid unnecessary prolixity). Hedges: cautious notes about the way the utterance is to be interpreted.
- Maxim of Quality: - as far as I know - I may be mistaken
- Maxim of Quantity: - as you probably know
- Maxim of Relation: - I don't know if this is important
- Maxim of Manner: - I'm not sure if this makes sense - this may be a bit confused Another important device to obtain a good conversation is politeness. This notion is related to the one of "face", which refers to a social standing or esteem which every individual claims for him/her self and wants other people to respect. We distinguish:
- positive face: the individual desire to be liked and approved by others; - negative face: the individual wish to be allowed to go about his/her business without others imposing unduly on him/herself. Also politeness can be both positive and negative: it aims preserving the positive or the negative face of an individual. In the first case, politeness is expressed by showing interest, claiming common ground, seeking agreement and giving sympathy. Negative politeness is express by being conventionally indirect, minimising the imposition, begging forgiveness and giving deference. These are mitigating devices, linguistic items exploited in order to avoid face threatening acts, that is, acts which could compromise the positive or negative face of one or both the participants in the conversation. Converesational Analysis. This kind of analysis identifies and systematises the basic principle of spoken language, it is mostly applied to face-to-face conversations. It focuses on the structures of talk in interaction, not only on conversation but also on talk in professional and workplace setting such as doctor-patient conversation, courtroom- classroom talk etc. The aim of the conversational analysis is to defamiliarise what we normally take for granted in order to better understend the machanism which stays at its basis. The conversational analysis investigates the strategies adopted by the participants of a conversation in order to take their turn or repair a problem in the negotiation of the floor (that is, the right to speak). Usually, in order to take a turn, participants have to identify the turn- transition relevance place: it's generally indicated by particular prosodic and grammatical structures as well as non-verbal behaviour. There are two main mechanisms that regulate the allocation of turns: - the current speaker selects the following speaker by naming him/her or by producing a first part of an adjancency pair; - the next speaker self-selects him/herself. In this case the next speaker should pay
relates to the assumptions language users make about the kind of speech event they're participating in, and what they consider appropriate in a particular context. This brings to the issue of cross-cultural communication and the different meanings which non-verbal behaviour might have in cross-cultural contexts. For example, interactional sociolinguistics focus on gaze behaviour, prosodic features (intonation, ptich and stress) paralinguistic features (hesitation, pauses and contrasts of volume), that is, all those aspects that are not clearly represented in written language but are fundamental in a communicative act. If we fail to understand people's contextualization cues, weìll miss part of the meaning the are trying to communicate. Critical discourse analysis: it concentrateson the ideological dimension of discourse and it is important to identify it because it shows things which may be hidden in the text. It studies the way in which texts and speech have reproduced and influenced the social power abuse and inequality in the social and political context. SPOKEN LANGUAGE WRITTEN LANGUAGE Speech is a process VS writing is a product Speech is time-bound, dynamic, Writing is a space-bound, static, transient. It's part of an permanent. It is the result of a interaction in which both situation in which the writer is participants are usually present. usually distant from the reader and often doesn't know who the reader is. There is an opportunity to Errors and other perceived re-think an utterance while it is inadequacies can be eliminated in progress (starting again, adding in later drafts without the a qualification). However, errors, reader ever knowing they were once spoken, cannot be withdrawn. there. Interruptions, if they have occured while writing, are also invisible in the final product. Speech is contect-bound VS writing is not context-bound
Because participants are typically Lack of visual contact means in face-toface interaction, they can that participants cannot rely on rely on such cues as facial context to make their meaning expression and gesture to aid meaning clear; nor is there any meaning (feedback). immediate feedback. The lexicon of speech is often Because writing cannot be characteristically vague, using context-bound, most writing words which refer directly to avoids the use of deictic the situation (deictic expressions). expressions, which are likely to be ambiguous. The spontaneity and speed of Writing allows repeted reading most speech exchanges makes and close analysis and it difficult to engage in complex promotes the development advance planning. of careful organisation. Lenghty coordinate sentences Multiple instances of often of great complexity are subordination in the same characteristic of (especially sentence and elaborately informal) speech. balanced syntactical patterns are characteristic of writing. Speech mainly has an interpersonal function VS writing mainly has an ideational function. Speech is good at establishing Writing is very suited to the or mantaining personal and recording of facts and the social relationships and at communication of ideas and expressing personal opinions to tasks of memory and and attitudes. learning. Malone's translation strategies: In "The Science of Linguistics in the Art of Translation", Malone identifies nine translation strategies:
- Equation: this strategy suggests some forms of automatic equivalence, for example: "Lorenzo fermò la macchina e vide un uomo" = "Lorenzo stopped the car and saw a man". The most obvious and common cases are loan words (example: spaghetti) and calques (= single words taken from the source language and adapted
tre banche" = "The gang is alleged / said / reported to have robbed three other banks" - Italian plural words which in English need the addition of some extra element because they're uncountable: "informazioni" = "some information"; "consigli" = "pieces of advice". According to Malone's classification, we have other antithetical strategies corresponding to the ones above:
- Substitution (antithesis of equation): this strategy is applied when translation has no morphosyntatic or semantic resemblance to the source text. Examples: - Grammatical perspective: the English genitive has no correspondence in Italian, where it has to be replaced by the form "di" ("Gulliver's Travels" = "I Viaggi di Gulliver"). - Semantic level: the examples are many and refer to proverbs, idiomatic expressions, figurative uses of language etc. Here the ST expression is replaced with a completely different expression which bears no resemblance to the source- language expression from a phonetic, grammatical and semantic point of view. Example: "It's raining cats and dogs" = "Piove a catinelle"
- Convergence (antithesis of divergence, many to one). It is the process thanks to which translators identify the most suitable term in the target language into which various terms of the soruce language might converge. Examples: - the Italian forms "tu", "Lei" and "voi" are translated as "you" - the Italian titles "commercialista", "ragioniere" and "contabile" all correspond to the English "accountant.
- Reduction (antithesis of amplification): this strategy consists of omitting elements in the target language because they're redundant or misleading. Example: we don't translate "carta geografica" with "geographical map" but simply with "map".
- Condensation (antithesis of diffusion): in this case the target text is more economic from a linguistic point of view (a source text item or utterance is contracted without omitting any layer of meaning). Examples: - "to look at" = "guardare" - "to fall in love" = "innamorarsi" We also talk of condensation when we have strings of adjectives and nouns which form concise, lexically-dense noun phrases (example: newspaper headlines).
- Reordering: it refers to the way words are positioned in the one language and the other. Examples: - inversions of the adjective-noun sequence which in Italian becomes a noun-adjective sequence: "black dog" = "cane nero"; - the verb-obgect positioning: "I love you" = "(io) ti amo". - others: "black and white" = "bianco e nero"; "E' successa una disgrazia" = "Something terrible has happened". Language of advertising. Advertising texts are a mixture of literary, journalistic and commercial texts, from which they seem to borrow features and assume some of their functions. Adverts are used to inform customers of the existence of a new product, to convince them of its superior quality and to persuade them to buy it. The advertising process involves both linguistic and non-linguistic features: through images
and grammar of visual design, publicity texts manage to create a strong bond between particular products and ideals (beauty, youth, strenght, success, etc.), consequently they suggest that by buying a particular product, consumers will get hold of the quality inherent in the product itself. Often we see that the messages in adverts are delivered by famous people, because advertisers hope that the prestige the communicator has will be tranferred to the product. Techniques of advertisement: - Hard sell: is a simple and direct technique which urges consumers to buy a particular product by giving them one or more reasons to do it. It's generally used for utilitarian products such as detergens.
- Soft sell: is a much subtler and emotive technique which exploits the relationship existing between language and ideology. It is used to advertise luxury items such as chocolates, perfumes, jewels etc. Advertising can exploit different formats:
- Product-information format: the product is the centre of the focus and its virtues are pointed out and explained;
- Product-image format: the product is associated with a certain image that we may not readily attribute to it;
- Personalised format: a direct relationship is established between the product and human personality and the product itself is represented as an intimate partner for the person who participates in the advert;
- Lifestyle format: the product is associated with a particular lifestyle (this format is popular with soft drinks, mobiles, cars and any other luxury item). We can identify the different techniques exploited in order to achieve the best result in the campaign of a product. 1. The weasel words techique: uses empty but colorful words to create adverts that can be easily memorised;
- The endorsement technique: a celebrity tells us how wonderful the product is;
- The statistical technique: provides statistical proof of the product qualities;
- The expert technique: exploits the appeal that a figure presented as an expert might exercise (for example, the adverts promoting baby products);
- The mystery ingredient technique: suggests some new discovery has been made (examples: "nuova formula"; "formula più efficace"; etc.).
- The compliment the user technique: makes consumers feel they have the right to use the product (example: L'Oréal: "because you're worth it").
- The nostalgia technique: used for products which have been on the market for a long time. Verbal and non-verbal elements used in atverts.
- Non-verbal elements:
- the visual: main image/picture, which consists of a setting (interior/exterior, familiar and real/nostalgic and imaginary, fantastic/exotic), props (functional:object is part of the scene / functional and metaphorical:object is part of
language, use of ryhme, alliteration, syntactic parallelism, condensation of meaning achieved through nominal groups (group of words which functions as though it were a noun), use of cohesive devices (repetition of words or pattern of words, synonyms, semantically related words.)) Context of Situation. Malinowski: context of situation/context of culture Firth, Hymes: to decode a message correctly, we need to take into consideration both the particular situation in which the communicative exchange takes place and the different culutral background it stems from. LANGUAGE IN USE -> CONTEXT: cultural and situational -> DISCOURSE: language as communication/purposes for which we speak and write. The context helps the receiver of a message to interpret what is said or written. He/she should take into consideration not only the speaker's intentions, but also other variables such as people taking part in the communicative act, the topic, the setting, etc. Text: it can be considered as a web of relations assigning each other a meaning and which can be interpreted only if they're put in relation to another. NOTION OF SYSTEM (STRUCTURALISM): language is a system aimed at producing meanings, it is a semantic system in which meanings are expressed by grammar and vocabulary. According to Halliday, language or any other semiotic system is interpreted as networks of interlocking options, starting with the most general features and proceeding step by step becoming evermore specific. Language is a social activity related to the social system which we often define as a synonym of culture. It deals with the relationship with the social structure. The aims of discourse analyis are: - understanding the text
- evaluating it and its effectiveness. The contecxt of situation coincides with the extratextual context of text and points to the fact that in order to interpret a message correctly we must understand linguistic and situational clues, identifying the communicative environment of the text itself. It refers to Jakobson's model of communication: the meaning of a message resides not in a simple factor of the speech act but in the total act of communication. The speaker has to develop a co0mmunicative competence: he has to know when to speak and when not, what
to talk about with whom, when, where and in what manner. Components of the context of situation: - Firth: - participants (role and status)
- verbal and non-verbal actions
- relevant objects and events
- effects of verbal actions
- Hymes:
- participants
- message form
- message content
- setting
- medium of communication
- intent of communication
- tone
- genre
- norms of interaction Houses' dimensions:
- Dimension of language user:
- geographical origin
- social class
- time
- Dimension of language use:
- medium (writte, spoken, written to be spoken)
- participation (dialogue, letter, etc.) - social role relationship (authority, friendliness)
- social attitude (frozen to intimate)
- province (field of topic) Register. The register is a variety of language used for a particular purpose or in a particular setting. Every country has a different culture and every country has a different register. Speakers use registers to say different things and to express different meanings according to the kind of social activity they're engaging in. So, registers reflect conventionally-accepted types of discourse which differ from one another mainly in terms of vocabulary and grammar. Halliday and Hasan have identified 3 main variables which determine register:
- FIELD: It refers to the subject matter and the nature of the activity. We can speak of technical, scientific and legal register, language of sports and so on, depending on the activity the participants engage in. Moreover, the field includes the event which is taking place, spatial and temporal setting, participants and what they know and believe.
- TENOR: It refers to the social relationships existing between the ones involved in terms of power and status. It can express the attitude of the Author of the message. We can speak of
substantial elements such as whole clauses or phrases are imported from another language, leading to the incorporation within the text of grammatical aspects of language).
- social dialect: it enables the readers/listeners to identify the writer's/speaker's social origin on the basis of their affiliation to a particular social class. The translator should bear in mind the differences between the middle class and the working class of England and Italy.
- genderlect: it identifies the features distinguishing woman's language from man's language. The Notion of Function Halliday defines the components of meaning in language as "functional", because it has to performcertain tasks and speakers use languages for various purposes, they use it to satisfy their needs. So, he identifies semantic macro-functions corresponding to the abstract representations of those purposes, the metafunctions. Metafunctions refer to two main kinds of meaning, that is the ideational (or reflective) and the interpersonal (or active meaning). Ideational function: it is used to understand the environment. Language performs a referential function, that is, the speaker/writer commits to language his/her knowledge of the world, naming and describing things in the environment. Function: information, because it is used to express content. Interpersonal function: it is used to act on others in the environment. Language is used to express the speaker's meaning potential, to express his/her own beliefs, attitudes and evaluations. Function: interaction, thtat is, it defines the relationship between the speaker/ writer and his/her addressee, focusing on the role the users when participating in the speech act (persuading, informing, questioning, etc.) Moreover, Halliday identifies the textual function, which is instrumental to the previous two and ensures that what is said or written is relevant and relates to its contexts. The Co-text. The co-text is the linguistic context of a text, which enables the readers to identify all the elements of the text froma morphosyntactic point of view and to appreciate the relationship existing between one element of the text and all the others. This concept is related to the notion of cohesion. The notion of cohesion Cohesion occurs when the interpretation of some elements in the discourse is dependent on that of others. In order to interpret something we have to refer elsewhere in the utterance (understood here as the co-text of our text). For example: in order to interpret a sentence like "he said so" we have to make other passages in which there is an indication of who "he" is and what he said. Some forms of cohesion are related through grammar and vocabulary:
- GRAMMAR COHESION which is devided in 4 parts a) Reference : the information to be retrieved is the referential meaning. We can talk aboutanaphoric reference, which immediate provides the information ("that woman is Jane. She's Peter's sister"), and cataphoric reference, when we have a sort of clue within the text ,
whose meaning will become clear only afterwards ("I gave it back to Jack, the bike I borrowed"). We can identify other 3 kinds of reference: Personal reference (the category of person - speaker, addressee, you etc); Demonstrative reference (the location on a scale of proximity - this, that, here, there..); Comparative reference (indirect reference by similarity - same, identical, more, less better..) b) Conjunctions/connectives:
- Addition connectives - "and" -> Mary entered the room and sat at her desk. -Opposition connectives - "but, yet" -> It's very late, but I can't stay here - Cause connectives - "therefore, thus" -> From the information we have collect, we can therefore deduce this theory is valid - Time connectives - "then" -> He carried the ball through their defence and scored a try c) Substitution:
- Noun substitutes -> "That's my bike" "Do you mean the red one?" bike/red one - Verb substitutes -> "I never kissed her" "You might have done" kissed/have done - Clause substitutes -> "Carla is very beautiful but she's not intelligent" Carla/she d)Ellipsis:
- Noun ellipsis - Verb ellipsis - Clause ellipsis
- LEXICAL COHESION a) Repetition:
- Of words - Of patterns of words b) Synonyms:
- Straightforward synonyms - Synonyms with word class change c) Semantically related words:
- Hyponyms - Superordinates - Antonyms - Words relating to the same semantic field Textual types and genre analysis We can have different type of text: - Descriptive, with subjective descriptions or objective description, where impersonal construction are often used. - Argumentative, when the text concernes the cognitive process of evaluation and the attention is focused on the relationship between concepts and evaluation. - Narrative, where the text relates to facts, events, and people and the event are in a sequential order. - Expositive, when the text relates to the cognitive process of the person (in dictionary, encyclopaedias, manuals etc). - Instructive, when the text relates to the cognitive process involved in the preparation of programs of various kind (for give orders, information, advices etc). Information packaging in written text Package information in the text help the receiver to understand the text. Grammar also help us to understand why some texts are more effective than others, and the reasons why they can persuade people to do or buy something (in political or advertising campaigns). If we change the structure of the sentence we change the way in which the information is processed by the listener/reader. For example, in an unmarked clause, the given - the theme - (the shared knowledge) is placed at the beginning of the clause and is followed by information which is considered new - the rheme -. The thematisation is a tendency to arrange the sentence in such a way to focuses attention on what is communicatively important. The organisation of theme and rheme depends on the genre of our text and its purpose, and any variation becomes a device in order to focuses attention on a particular element.
- shocking (emotive)
- disgusting (emotive)
- hateful (emotive)
- related to a crime of some sort (factual) b. secondary/descriptive components:
- morally bad (emotive/factual) A proper translation might be "abominevole". -> SHAME a. essential/functional components:
- embarrassing (emotive)
- humiliating (emotive)
- related to a disgrace or scandal (in war, social life, in sexual life, etc.; factual) b. secondary/descriptive components:
- vulgar
- loud
- dishonourable
- infamous
- detestable Context of culture. The context of culture can be defined as the total cultural background which lies behind a text and which determines its significance. From a sociolinguistic and an anthropological perspective, it corresponds to every aspect of human life including arts, social activities and patterns of behaviour typical of a community (manners, rituals, ...), legal systems, religions, history etc. Cultural Turn According to this notion, translation cannot simply coincide with a linguistic transcoding, but has to posit itself as a cultural transfer as well. Also in translation studies the receiver viewpoint becomes paramount and the emphasis is laid not so much on micro and macro syntactical elements but on higher structures on the relevance that the target text assumes in the target culture. Notion of polisystem: is a set of literary systems including both high and low cultures. Thanks to this system the translations and interliterary relations amongst different cultures are described more precisely and the actual literary and linguistic developments, together with the interliterary relationships within the system are analysed and brought to light through translation. Translation conventions:
- initial: translators resort to this one to decide whether to adhere to the ST conventions, adopt the conventions of the TT or embrace the conventions of both texts.
- preliminary: includes factors such as the ones regulating the selection of the work to be translated and the general strategies of translationto be adopted within the polisystem
- operative: refers specifically to the decisions taken during the translation process. Communicative translation and translation loss. It may happen to find an expression deeply rooted in the culture of origin and might be scarcely comprehensible to TL receivers and difficult to translate. So, it becomes fundamental to have a strong background in the culture the texts stem from in order to exorcise the filters we resort to whenever we approach a text. These filters can be identified with conceptual and tectual grids which underpin all forms of writing and derive from the cultural and literary conventions of a given tima and space. Problems in translating are caused at least as much by discrepancies in conceptual and textual grids as by discrepancies in language, so translators have to bear in mind the sets of grids in both source and target systems in order to avoid the imposition of a text on another. This practive may be considered as an example of cultural transplantation, that is one of the extremes of the ideal scale representing the various degrees of cultural transposition the translator can resort to in his/her work. Opposite to transplantation, we have exoticism and calqued expressions, thanks to which grammatical and cultural features of the ST are imported into the TT with minimal adaptation. Between these two extremes, we find two intermediate degrees:
- cultural borrowing: is insidious for translators, who think they can adopt the foreign word as a loan without realising that the same expression might have more meaning in the ST than in the target language or might refer to something different (example: ballerina-> in English means "classical ballet dancer" --- drink-> in Italian: alcoholic drink/in English: any kind of drink);
- communicative translation: it is used to translate texts in which the transmission of the content appears the main target of translation, independent of stylistic or cultural peculiarities. It is adopted for clichés, idiomatic expressions, proverbs and so on, that is all those cases in which a literal translation would result in a non-sense or a comic expression. So, this kind of translation might be defined as equivalent target-culture situation and it might be considered as an exemplification of the notion of dynamic equivalence elaborated by Nida. According to Nida the communicative translation is the creation of an expression reflecting the way we would say something in the target language and becomes more particularly relevant in the translation of idiomatic expressions. Example: - "He was born with a silver spoon in his mouth" can be considered equivalent to "è nato con un cucchiaio d'argento in bocca", but actually the right equivalence is "è nato con la camicia". The notion of Intertextuality: Intertextuality is a strategy used in order to convey more than the literal meaning of words. It refers to the fact that aughors of any kind insert parts of other texts in their own. This idea correspond to the structuralist notion that all perceptions/conceptions of reality are shaped by various cultural codes and that every work or version of reality is basically a recycling of another story. It might be said to activate a scenario which represents some stereotypical
