Tradurre un corpus di memoria storico-biografica. Strategie di semplificazione e adattamento per il pubblico italiano

Abstract

This article presents the German-Italian translation of the FGOP corpus Fluchtgeschichten aus Ostpreußen (refugee stories from Eastern Prussia), which consists of autobiographical narrative interviews conducted between 2015 and 2017 with Germans from Eastern Prussia and related to stories of flight and expulsion (Flucht- und Vertreibung) that occurred at the end of World War II (Cinato 2020). The approximately ten-hour interviews with three siblings who survived the war with very different experiences are available in the Datenbank für Gesprochenes Deutsch (DGD) of the Leibniz Institut für Deutsche Sprache (IDS) in Mannheim (corpus FGOP, escape stories from Eastern Prussia), and are part of a project at the University of Turin involving their transcription using the GAT2 system (Selting 2009), as well as their translation into Italian, the latter for the purpose of scientific research dissemination (activities of Public Engagement). The analysis offered herein aims, on one hand, to highlight the most important linguistic aspects of the autobiographical narrative interview text type and, on the other hand, to show the translation strategies and difficulties that one encounters when translating. Particular attention is paid to the adaptation strategies that need to be adopted for the Italian public who does not know these facts at all or knows very little about them. The translator thus needs to provide explanations and clarifications linked both to the family and the historical-institutional spheres. Very often, adaptation also means a simplification of the translated text, due to the many characteristics of spoken language, the tendency towards standardization and the mitigation of the stylistic and/or sociolinguistic variations inherent in the translations (Toury 1995). Selected examples are thus used to check what type of adaptation is necessary for this type of text and what simplification strategies can result from this process.