| dc.description.abstract | The defining characteristic of a pedagogy informed by philosophical cosmopolitanism is
a focus on the dialogic imagination: the coexistence of rival ways of life in the individual
experience which incites us to interrogate common sense assumptions on culture, language, and
identity, and combine contradictory certainties in an effort to think in terms of inclusive
oppositions while rejecting the logic of exclusive oppositions.
One of the goals of the Trans-Atlantic and Pacific Project (TAPP), an educational
network of bilateral writing-translation projects that establishes links between students in
different countries, is to invite students to mediate between languages, cultures, and rhetorical
traditions with the goal of transcending differences and find common ground. Students who
participate to TAPP understand what is at stake when they write for a global audience by
cultivating an attitude of openness that invites hospitable communication practices.
The goal of the explorative study illustrated in the second part of the dissertation is to
identify regularities of translation strategies in the genre of technical instructions. The dataset
consists of a corpus of 40 texts compiled by pairing up 20 instructions written in English by
students majoring in different areas of engineering in an American university and their
translations into Italian (19,046 words), completed by students majoring in English in an Italian
university.
The research questions are: With reference to the translation strategies explicitation,
implicitation, generalization, and particularization, what evidence is there of uniformity of
practice in the translation of instructions from English into Italian? What are the most typical
causes of zero shifts? Why do translators resort to rhetorical shifts? Results show that nonprofessional
translators tend to resort more to implicitation than explicitation, and more to particularization than generalization. Due to the limited size of the corpus, it was impossible to
identify typical causes for zero shifts, but further studies should focus on how writers can
facilitate translation by using the topic/comment structure. Finally, translators resort to rhetorical
shifts for reasons that have to do with cultural appropriateness in the target locale. The most
common type of rhetorical shifts are context-related shifts in emphasis. | en_US |
