The translator’s presence in (re)translations of To the Lighthouse into Italian: a corpus-driven study

In a corpus approach to empirical translation study, I compare three re-translations of Virginia Woolf’s To the Lighthouse into Italian by Nadia Fusini in the 1990s and 2012 with the first translation by Giulia Celenza, published in 1934. The focus is on how and to what degree those translations render the modernist characteristics of the source text. The adopted method is implemented using suitable annotations of the digital texts. All the occurrences of linguistic and extra-linguistic features, including the stream of consciousness, indirect interior monologue and free indirect discourse, are identified and manually tagged in xml/tei code throughout the texts examined. A bespoke computer program is used to extract, align and compare the literary features. The results show the translators’ target-culture orientation in both ‘distant’ and ‘close reading’, with interesting instances of source text-orientation in the later re-translations.