(Re)visioning Translation. The Perception and Readability of Translation in the Post-Digital Work

Giuseppe Sofo
(Università Ca’ Foscari, Venezia)

Abstract:
Digital Humanities have produced a large number of tools of great utility and interest for textual analysis, introducing significant changes with respect to our approach to textual studies, especially in the field of linguistic and stylistic analysis, or for textual comparison within the same language. In the field of interlingual analysis, i.e. the comparison between texts in different languages, the tools are still lacking and are not always of great help for an in-depth study of the implications of each passage between languages, or between different systems of signs and ideas. The greatest challenge to date, therefore, is to conceive and build tools that are able to allow not only a linguistic and stylistic analysis between several languages, but also a different perception and readability of translation, as a tool that introduces fluidity and plurality in the text. What are the tools, software, or devices that would allow the reading of the text no longer together or in parallel with its translations, but in combination with its translations? The paper aims to stimulate reflection on the possibility of perceiving the literary work as a text that is structurally non-definitive, but rather plural, fluid, open to its multiple versions, even in multiple languages, and on the possibilities that digital humanities have of favouring this process.

Giuseppe Sofo is a researcher of French language and translation at the Ca’ Foscari University of Venice. He holds a Ph.D. and a Doctor Europaeus from the University of Avignon and the University of Rome, La Sapienza. He has taught translation and literature in Italian, French and American institutions, and he has published a work on translation, rewriting and the fluidity of the literary text (I sensi del testo, Novalogos, Rome, 2018), co edited a collection of essays on translation (Sulla traduzione, Solfanelli, 2015), and has translated literary works intoItalian.