„Ogumienie mózgu” w „słabym świetle postępu”
The “Brain’s Tyre” in a “Faint Light of Progress”

The Pitfalls of Syntagmatic and Indirect Translation on the Example of the Italian Version of Bieguni (Flights) by Olga Tokarczuk

Summary/Abstract: This paper is devoted to the Italian translation of Bieguni by Olga Tokarczuk, entitled I Vagabondi. As the author argues, it is a kind of patchwork translation, partly translated from the original language, partly from the novel’s English version (Flights). The Italian translation of both source texts, Polish and English, contains a full range of typical syntagmatic translation errors, consisting in mechanically reproducing the structures of the source language (word-for-word translation) without delving into the meaning of the translated text. The author analyses at first, on selected examples, translation errors from the Polish source text, distinguishing between lexical errors and dictionary equivalents, including those impeding the fluidity of the target text, false friends, calques, misinterpretation errors as well as omissions and additions. He focuses next on analogous errors produced in the indirect translation from English, sorting separately the lexical and interpretative errors resulting already in the English intermediate text and reproduced in the Italian translation.

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