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Annalisa SEZZI

Ricercatore t.d. art. 24 c. 3 lett. B
Dipartimento Educazione e Scienze Umane

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Pubblicazioni

2023 - Bullying explained to children and teenagers. Knowledge dissemination, interpersonal meaning and participants’ roles on educational websites [Articolo su rivista]
Sezzi, Annalisa
abstract

In recent decades, bullying has received increased public and media attention. On the one hand, recent digital transformations have exacerbated the phenomenon leading to new forms of online harassment (cyberbullying). On the other hand, the World Wide Web has allowed parents, teachers, and children to access information and provide and receive support more easily. Particularly concerning younger audiences, educational websites serve as an important channel for popularization. Not only do they make topics in various disciplines comprehensible to children and teenagers, but they also tackle challenging issues to develop awareness in the youth and eventually encourage them to take action. These web-based educational hypermedia are rooted in “edutainment” (combining education and entertainment), interactivity, and multimodality, which are exploited to make sensitive issues more accessible to young audiences. In this context, the present paper concentrates on two health educational websites for children and teenagers (Health for Kids and Kids Health Hub), specifically examining their subdirectories on bullying prevention. The analysis explores how these two subdirectories disseminate knowledge about bullying and address the different participants in this phenomenon (bullies, victims, witnesses, teachers, and parents) from a multimodal and discursive perspective. Special attention is devoted to transferring knowledge via recourse to different types of explanation, and to the role played by image-text combinations in engaging users. These strategies are shown to reflect the type of information conveyed and the different roles represented.

2023 - Tradurre “germi, virus, batteri e altri microscopici mostri” per ragazze e ragazzi [Articolo su rivista]
Sezzi, Annalisa
abstract

The translation of informational texts is still an unexplored field of research, in terms of popularisation both for adults (Liao 2013) and for children (Reiss 1982; Tabbert 2002; Sezzi 2017, 2019a; Masi 2021). In particular, the latter poses many challenges to the translator in that implies a form of “edutainment”, a “hybrid genre” that merges education and entertainment in multiple ways and to different extents (Scanlon e Buckingham 2002). In the context of the recent Covid-19 pandemic and the related need to give children guidance and information on topics related to the viral disease and its variants, risks, consequences, as well as prevention, this paper concentrates on the Italian translations of three English informational books for children which were published or re-edited to provide knowledge about germs, viruses and bacteria in general before and during the Covid-19 outbreak. In particular, working along the lines of Calsamiglia and Van Dijk (2004: 370), we shall compare and contrast the discursive strategies adopted in order to recontextualise and disseminate knowledge from experts to non-experts. As will be seen, the translated texts appear to be more complex both from a content and terminological point of view, and more formal, sometimes to the detriment of the humour that characterizes both language and images in the source texts. In the Italian translations, humour is restricted to the iconic apparatus. On these grounds, it is safe to claim that the Italian translations undergo a further re-mediation based on the idea of (more formal) knowledge, while still retaining the expressive dimension and popularising goals of the source texts.

2022 - An intergalactic journey to the popularization of modern art in museum-based websites for children [Articolo su rivista]
Sezzi, Annalisa
abstract

The aim of this paper is to explore how modern art is disseminated among children through museum-based websites. As a matter of fact, there are few well-known museums and galleries that have websites specifically designed to enable children to gain insight into the artworks and the protagonists of their collections or to visit their rooms virtually. Specifically, these websites create an interactive learning environment based on the combination of education and entertainment (“edutainment”) and on specific discourse and multimodal strategies that recontextualize art expert discourse for the young lay audience. Thus, the analysis focuses on the popularizing discursive practices used in three museum-based websites for children: Tate Kids, MetKids, and Destination Modern Art: An Intergalactic Journey to MoMA and P.S.1. Tate Kids and MetKids are examined both quantitatively and qualitatively, while Destination Modern Art is investigated only qualitatively, as it partly differs from the other two.

2022 - Wasted world o sporco mondo: tradurre i testi divulgativi per ragazzi sull’ambiente. [Articolo su rivista]
Sezzi, Annalisa
abstract

The paper focuses on the Italian translations of two English informational books for children: Wasted World (2009) and Kids Fight Climate Change (2020), which deal with environmental issues. Informational books texts result from a complex dissemination process aimed at making specialised knowledge comprehensible to young readers. To achieve this purpose, informational books rely on various discursive popularising strategies, such as an array of explanations, and various methods for eliciting readers’ engagement, such as questions and irony. Indeed, they are part of what has come to be known as “edutainment,” in which education and entertainment are intertwined to create a “hybrid genre” (Buckingham and Scanlon, 2005). As the texts examined in the paper engage with ecology and environmental issues, they have a dual purpose: to inform and to raise awareness (ecoliteracy). Despite the importance of popularising texts, the translation of such products is still an underexplored field of research. The comparative analysis of the two English texts and their respective Italian translations centres on how global warming and climate change are described in the source and target texts. It examines how the popularising strategies are translated, given their importance in knowledge dissemination for children. The findings indicate that Italian translations, though retaining the combination of education and entertainment, tend to be more precise and more complex than the source texts. This is in line with the intercultural differences identified between Low Context (LC) cultures and High Context (HC) cultures.

2021 - Disseminating the Tangible and Intangible Heritage of Sacred Places in the 21st Century: The Websites of British and Italian Cathedrals. [Articolo su rivista]
Bondi, Marina; Sezzi, Annalisa
abstract

This paper considers how cultural and religious heritage is disseminated in websites presenting British and Italian cathedrals. Sacred places are typically at the intersection of different forms of tourism—cultural tourism and religious tourism—and contribute to the transmission of tangible and intangible assets (“buildings and monuments, artistic objects, and also texts, legends, rites and so on” [Aulet and Vidal 2018, 244]). The study is based on a corpus of webtexts in Italian and English, collected respectively from the official websites of Italian and British cathedrals. The analysis looks at this kind of tourism discourse as a form of expert-to-non-expert communication that makes the visitor take part in an imaginary journey (Bonsignori and Cappelli 2019; Cappelli and Masi 2019; Cappelli 2016) in which different types of explanation (Calsamiglia and van Dijk 2004) are adopted to make specialized vocabulary accessible to visitors. The focus is on definitions and denomination (in relation to both art/architecture and religion). The quantitative study shows that the Italian corpus presents a marked preference for denomination (and denominations in the field of art/architecture in particular), while the corpus of British cathedrals is characterized by a marked preference for definitions. The qualitative analysis suggests that this may also depend on a marked stylistic preference in Italian for introducing the nicknames of the artists or specifying names in the local dialect, as against a clearer intention of disseminating the cultural and religious heritage to non-experts in the corpus of websites of British cathedrals. The cultural and the religious components, however, seem to be equally important in both corpora and are often inseparable for the two often superimposed types of visitors.

2020 - A Thousand and One Voices of Where the Wild Things Are: Translations and Transmediations [Capitolo/Saggio]
Sezzi, Annalisa
abstract

This chapter sets out to explore the different voices that can be heard in the first Italian translation and the more recent retranslation of a classic picturebook: Where the Wild Things Are by Maurice Sendak. Picturebooks derive their meaning from the relationship between words and illustrations. Lawrence Sipe defines this interrelation as “synergistic,” and shows how the reader’s oscillation between the verbal and visual material can be seen as a form of “transmediation”. However, this interpretative process turns out to be more complex as picturebooks come to life through the adults’ reading performance. Thus, the chorus of the discursive presences detectable in children’s texts and in their translations (O’Sullivan, Comparative Children’s Literature), such as the voice of the narrator and of the translator, is joined by the voice of the adult reading aloud. Since retranslations act as sounding boards for both textual and contextual voices (Alvstad and Assis Rosa), the aim of this analysis is to identify the changes of the voices in the translation (in 1969) and retranslation (in 2018) of Sendak’s chef d’oeuvre.

2020 - Scientific websites for children: nurturing children’s scientific literacy through the conflation of multiple semiotic resources [Articolo su rivista]
Diani, G.; Sezzi, A.
abstract

Nowadays, knowledge dissemination among children is no longer limited to the classroom and course or information books. It also includes websites explicitly addressed to youngsters who have a different stage of cognitive development and background knowledge compared to adults. However, they are also the first to live in today’s multimodal hypertext environment and have a multimodal and multimedial communicative competence. In web-based educational hypermedia, education and entertainment often converge, relying on different semiotic resources. In point of fact, the term ‘edutainment’ is frequently used to describe such a combination. Edutainment websites are also one of the main accesses to science for children. In particular, explanations of scientific phenomena are frequently intertwined with different kinds of visual material, partly evoking science books. The aim of this paper is to shed light on the verbal-visual interplay in three scientific websites designed for children in English, whose express aim is to popularize scientific knowledge.

2020 - Specialized Communication in English: Analysis and Translation [Monografia/Trattato scientifico]
Bondi, Marina; Cacchiani, Silvia; Malavasi, Donatella; Sezzi, Annalisa
abstract

The volume takes on the challenges posed by teaching specialized communication and specialized translation to University students in Italy. In particular it originates from the course of English specialised communication and translation held within the master’s degree programme in Languages for Communication in International Enterprises and Organization (LACOM), at the Department of Studies on Language and Culture of the University of Modena and Reggio Emilia, Italy. The course has been jointly taught by the four authors over the years. The reason behind this clarification is twofold: on the one hand, the contents and the structure of the chapters try to meet students’ actual needs; on the other hand, the teaching experience was the driving force behind the attempt to face the enduring conundrum between theory and practice. In this regard, the volume does not have the ambition to fill this gap, but the network of recurring heuristic tools, concepts, and strategies throughout the chapters, associated with examples and practical resources, disclose the strict connection between these two sides of the same coin. Innumerable other coursebooks attempt to do so, one might say. Yet, the peculiarity of this volume resides in the fact that it outlines a range of approaches to specialized discourse and translation, while focusing on the translation of two specific genres - CSR reports and contracts - whose similarities and divergencies open up readers’ horizons over the complexity of specialized translation in general. Furthermore, the two working languages are Italian and English, and both the translation into one’s own mother tongue and into a foreign language are taken into account. This is again one foot in reality, as specialized translators or enterprises’ employees are often required to translate into English even if they are not native speakers.

2020 - Translating crossover picturebooks: the Italian translations of "Bear Hunt" by Anthony Browne [Capitolo/Saggio]
Sezzi, Annalisa
abstract

This chapter sets out to explore the challenges posed by the translation of crossover picture books, that is, works addressing the child and the adult alike. Building on recent research on the translation of picture books and on aspects related to performativity and read-aloudability in children's literature, the investigation focuses on the Italian translation (1990) and retranslation (1999) of Bear Hunt by Anthony Browne. The case study shows how the two translators adopted different solutions when tackling the relationship between visual and verbal, the read-aloud situation put on by the adult reading aloud, and the different layers of meaning of Browne's picture book. Grounded on O'Sullivan's scheme on narrative communication for translation, the comparative analysis also attempts to account for the differences between the implied child reader and the implied adult reading aloud in the source text and in the target text.

2020 - “Tiny new ingredients are a big concern”. The popularization of nanotechonologies in environmental organizations’ and institutions’ publications. [Articolo su rivista]
Poppi, Franca; Sezzi, Annalisa
abstract

The chapter sets out to explore how nanotechnology is popularised in online reports and brochures in English issued by European and American institutions1 and environmental organizations. Nanotechnologies, by manipulating matter at a nanoscale, have a great impact on several disciplines and find applications in sectors such as medicine, engineering, electronics, food, and renewable resources. Given the repercussions on humans’ daily life, many information campaigns have been launched in order to disseminate nanotechnological knowledge to lay people. Different forms and media have been exploited as in other knowledge dissemination processes, with the new media and Web 2.0 playing an important role (Garzone 2007). If knowledge dissemination has been often seen in terms of a “recontextualization” (Calsamiglia, Van Dijk 2004) and a “translation” (Gotti 2013) of specialized information from experts to non-experts as opposed to specialized discourse (Ciapuscio 2003; Calsamiglia, van Dijk 2004; Minelli de Oliveira, Pagano 2006; Kermas, Christiansen 2013; Bongo, Caliendo 2014; Garzone 2014; Gotti 2014; Bathia et al. 2015; Salvi, Bowker 2015), it is nonetheless true that this transfer of information often goes beyond the aim of making exclusive knowledge more comprehensible to the generic public. As a matter of fact, popularized discourse frequently aims “to inform, raise awareness and cause the reader to take action” (Gotti 2014, p. 29). A striking example is for instance health discourse (Cummings 2004, 2005, 2009; Hall 2006). Therefore, this chapter intends to analyse how specialized concepts pertaining to the domain of nanotechnology are popularized in online institutions’ and environmental organizations’ reports and brochures in English and in Italian. With the former emphasizing the advantages and the latter the risks of nanoscience, a common point they share is, however, their concern with the diffusion of nano knowledge and its related vocabulary. More specifically, the analysis, based on Calsamiglia and van Dijk’s classification of five “types of explanation” (2004, p. 372), will identify the discursive strategies adopted.

2019 - Go on an Art Adventure: Popularizing Art for Children through Museum Websites [Capitolo/Saggio]
Sezzi, Annalisa
abstract

Freed from its elitist connotations, art has recently become a key focus in children’s non-fiction. Books on artists’ lives and art movements proliferate in the market addressed to children, thus opening the doors of art history to very young aesthetes. Conversely, art in the World Wide Web is still mainly limited to “arts and crafts activities” for kids. This tendency seems to be exceptionally overridden by a counter-tendency led by few museums and galleries. As a matter of fact, museums are no longer “cultural islands” but active cultural agents (Bondi 2009) that market and popularize themselves through their websites. With regard to children, most museum websites briefly present workshops and events they organize for children with a marketing intent (Sabatini 2017). However, few of them offer online materials and sections explaining the art and life of the protagonists of their collections, hence relegating the promotional discourse in the background and giving prominence to art popularization. An interesting case is Tate Kids, the website of the Tate Gallery family entirely dedicated to children. In the context of research on specialized knowledge dissemination to adults (e.g., Ciapuscio 2003; Calsamiglia, van Dijk 2004) and children (e.g., Myers 1989), we shall therefore concentrate on the different strategies that Tate Kids adopts in order to market itself and, most importantly, to disseminate art knowledge among children, who do not only lack specialist knowledge but also have a different stage of cognitive development (Myers 1989).

2019 - The EU for Children: A Case of Web-mediated Knowledge Dissemination [Capitolo/Saggio]
Diani, Giuliana; Sezzi, Annalisa
abstract

The paper examines the communication of institutional information about the European Union focussing on how said information is organised and re-contextualised in order for it to be both comprehensible and precise and/or appealing to readers with little or no competence in the matter (given their stage of cognitive development and their limited background knowledge). In the light of the impact that knowledge re-contextualisation has on several aspects of communication, which range from lexico-syntactic patterns to different discourse strategies, the paper aims to disclose the discursive resources employed to disseminate the concept of the EU in two official websites, Kids’ Corner and Euro Kids’ Corner, both launched by the Commission in 2011 as part of their educational communication expressly addressed to children.

2019 - ’A doll’, said his brother. ‘Don’t be a creep!’ Challenging Gender Stereotypes and Promoting Gender Diversity in the Translation of William’s Doll [Capitolo/Saggio]
Sezzi, Annalisa
abstract

Since the 1970s, picturebooks for pre-schoolers have been at the heart of the studies centred on gender stereotyping and gender identity in children’s literature (Ernst 1995; Stephens 1996; Sunderland 2011; Epstein 2013; Epstein 2014). This is hardly surprising given their pivotal role in children’ sex role development and socialization (Weitzman, Eifler, Hokada, Ross 1972; Flanagan 2010). Indeed, most of these literary products have been tools for explicitly and implicitly perpetrating stereotyped gender models and beliefs by presenting fixed sex-typed behaviours and a prevalence of male protagonists over female ones (see Weitzman, Eifler, Hokada, and Ross 1972; Kolbe and LaVoie 1981; Segel 1982; Anderson and Hamilton 2005). However, despite the persistence of this imbalance between male and female characters and gendered biases, the last three decades have seen the proliferation of non-sexist, anti-sexist, (Zipes 1987; Kropp and Halverson, 1983; Davis 1984; Dellmann-Jenkins, Florjancic, and Swadener 1993, Sunderland 2011), and LGBT children’s books thanks to different social movements (Sunderland 2011; Epstein 2013). The aim of this paper is to analyse a specific picturebook, William’s Doll by Charlotte Zolotow, published in 1972, and its Italian translation, which saw the light almost 40 years later. This picturebook is considered a revolutionary text, showing one of the first “gender-transgressive characters” (Herzog 2009: 64) portrayed in this genre. Actually, the Italian version challenges gender roles more than the American source text in a complex interplay between the visual and the verbal levels. It is thereby emblematic of how translations can enhance gender diversity and inclusion and how the image of the child and of the adult reading aloud may diverge in the source text and in the target text.

2019 - “I am going on a ketogenic diet”. Communicating dietary requirements for pediatric patients [Articolo su rivista]
Sezzi, Annalisa; Bondi, Marina
abstract

The aim of this paper is to examine the popularizing strategies adopted in the websites of the Matthew’s Friends Foundation (UK) and the Charlie Foundation (US), which promote information on the ketogenic diet (KD), a dietary treatment for intractable epilepsy. The study is part of a wider project meant to explore how knowledge is mediated to patients and their caregivers. The analysis uses discourse and corpus tools to explore the main differences between the two foundations in the use of knowledge dissemination strategies and in the construction of the relationship with the caregivers through the use of multiple textual voices (representing experts and the readers themselves). While focusing on similar aspects and using similar techniques, the two foundations differ in the frequency of use of explanations and question-answer sequences, as well as in the way they interpret their role as mediators of knowledge

2019 - “’History is horrible but it is MORE Horrible in Some Places than Others’: the Translation of History Books for Children” [Articolo su rivista]
Sezzi, Annalisa
abstract

Information books on history are one of the essential vehicles for popularizing historical knowledge among juvenile audience. They are a form of « edutainment », a « hybrid genre » merging education with entertainment. The oxymoron combination of these two seemigly contradictory dimensions makes notions and concepts more comprehensible and involves young readers. If the importance of these texts in knowledge dissemination is indisputable, their translation is still an unexplored research area. This situation is determined by two factors: on the one hand, the translation of popularisation for adults is also univestigated (Liao 2010, 2013) and on the other, the studies on the translation for children are relatively recent (see Lathey 2006). The present study therefore compares two parallel corpora composed of two British series of history books for children and their respective Italian target texts, DK Eyewitness and Horrible Histories. The starting point is Reiss’ "Zur Übersetzung von Kinder – und Jügendbchern. Theorie und Praxis" (1982) in which she stresses that the content should be accurately tranferred in the translations of informative texts for children. Actually, the preciseness of the information given appears to be one of the translators’ main concerns rather than the precise rendition of the source content. Evidently, this tendency subsumes a different idea of knowledge popularisation, of education, and of the child reader between the source texts and the target texts.

2018 - 'Come what come may, Time, and the Houre, runs through the roughest Day' Temporal phraseology and the conceptual space of futurity in Macbeth [Articolo su rivista]
Bondi, Marina; Sezzi, Annalisa
abstract

The paper maps the lexico-grammatical resources of the representation of time in Macbeth, looking in particular at the way futurity is portrayed. The study is based on concordance analysis of the top full lexical items in frequency lists and of time-related keywords (generated using the other Shakespearian tragedies as a reference corpus). Paying particular attention to the occurrences in Macbeth and his wife's speeches, the analysis centres on the collocations and semantic preferences of the items identified. The top full lexical items in the wordlist are shown to be related to the notion of time, especially contrasting the present and the future, hence contributing to the pace of the plot in the play. Keywords highlight the connection of the notion of time with the notion of fear and with the impossibility of predicting the future. In general, the analysis depicts a conceptual space in which time and futurity are not connected to hope but to fear, thus creating a menacing universe that has its origins in the protagonist himself, in the tension between deceitful prediction and frustrated volition.

2017 - "Quello stregone che non era altri che lui, James Joyce di Dublino": le traduzioni di The Cat and the Devil in italiano [Articolo su rivista]
Sezzi, Annalisa
abstract

This article sets out to explore the dynamics through which Joyce’s version of the legend of the “devil’s bridge”, narrated in a letter addressed to his grandson, Stevie, entered the world of children’s literature in Italy. This occurred just after the legend’s publication in the USA and the UK under the title The Cat and the Devil. It was immediately turned into a picturebook, a sophisticated literary product aimed at very young readers. In fact, far from being a mere text for toddlers, the Italian Il gatto e il diavolo is at the centre of several intersemiotic and interlinguistic translations that enhance the interpretative potential and richness of Joyce’s narration, already at the crossroads between folkloric and modernist translation. The comparative analysis of three different Italian translations of the story expressly addressed to children (the first by Enzo Siciliano, published by Emme Edizioni in 1967; the second by Giulio Lughi for Edizioni EL in 1980; and the third and more recent one by Ottavio Fatica for ESG in 2010) has highlighted that the differences between them can be ascribed to distinct translation projects, aimed at building bridges between young readers and Joyce’s work in various periods of the history of the Italian literary market for children.

2017 - “History is Horrible. Especially in Schools:” Remediating History Books for Children in Translation [Capitolo/Saggio]
Sezzi, Annalisa
abstract

The paper focuses on information books on history and their translation, thereby examining the changes occurred in the translating process. If popularizing is an act of “mediation between expert and lay audience”, this “hybrid genre”, at the crossroad between informative and entertaining discourses, can be said to create a multifaceted and multimodal type of mediation that needs to meet children’s supposed cognitive abilities and background knowledge. In particular, the analysis shows that historical information books undergo a further process of “re-mediation”, underlying a different idea of popularisation and a different idea of readership. In point of fact, the shifts between the source texts and the target texts reveal an unexpected for of “complexification” through which the translations turn out to be more accurate than their respective originals. Therefore, the translations imply the idea that this “informal learning”, even if it is optional, needs to be detailed and exhaustive.

2017 - “Lutero nel cinema e in televisione” [Traduzione in Volume]
Sezzi, Annalisa
abstract

2016 - Evidence (re)presentation and evidentials in popular and academic history: facts and sources speaking for themselves [Articolo su rivista]
Bondi, Marina; Sezzi, Annalisa
abstract

The paper pivots around the different roles of evidentials and the different ways in which evidence is represented in the discourse of popular and academic history, thereby exploring the dynamics of both genres from a discourse analytical perspective. The analysis is based on two corpora of academic and popular articles on history. In particular, it is focused on those lexico-grammatical resources for tracing the speaker’s source and mode of information that constitute the distinguishing features of the two genres. The analysis shows that the high frequency of saw in popular articles refers to the narrative of history, and to the evidence provided by historical characters and sources, rather than by the speaker. The frequency of the attributor according in academic journal articles, on the other hand, clearly qualifies as evidentiality in the narrative of historiography, and acts as a marker of the importance of sources in historical reasoning. The different frequencies thus seem to be related to the different communicative and social functions of the two genres and to be closely connected with the triptych of narratives (Bondi 2015) involved in historical discourse.

2015 - Horrible Histories e Brutte storie: la traduzione dei libri divulgativi storici [Capitolo/Saggio]
Sezzi, Annalisa
abstract

Questo lavoro propone una prima analisi, collocata nell’ambito di un progetto più ampio, delle caratteristiche della traduzione dei testi divulgativi per ragazzi, in particolare di quelli storici; un’area d’indagine quasi del tutto inesplorata in ambito accademico. Lo studio comparativo di alcuni information books di tipo storico e delle loro traduzioni in italiano viene, nello specifico, concepito come una possibile cartina di tornasole per analizzare in chiave contrastiva non solo le diverse strategie di divulgazione, ma anche le diverse idee di divulgazione e di destinatario sottese al testo di partenza e al testo di arrivo.

2014 - 'My mother thinks I eat like this’ – ‘Mia madre pensa che io mangi come un maialino’: the Translation of Picture Books and of their many Languages [Relazione in Atti di Convegno]
Sezzi, Annalisa
abstract

Children under a certain age (7-10) are not able to understand figurative language and interpret it literally. However, children’s literature fully exploits its expressive potential, even in genres addressed to very young readers since the presence of a “difficult” language may actually stimulate the child’s imagination (Rodari 1997: 7). An interesting case is that of picture books, in which words and images both contribute to creating the narration given that, in these literary products for small children, figurative language combines in many ways: on the one hand, the illustrations might help in understanding the transferred meaning while, on the other, they generate a complex game of echoes between literal and figurative meanings (Terrusi 2012: 101). If, according to Epstein (2013: 23), the translator should try to face figurative expressions, the challenge in picture books is sometimes almost insurmountable because of the multimodal nature of these texts. The aim of this paper is therefore to examine how the figurative language is realized and how translators handle it. In particular, a selection of fifteen picture books by British and American classical authors has been analyzed; some of them turned out to be particularly useful for a preliminary classification.

2014 - Historical Academic Writing between local and transnational communities [Capitolo/Saggio]
Bondi, Marina; Sezzi, Annalisa
abstract

In recent papers (Bondi 2007a, 2007b, 2009, Bondi/Silver 2004, Bondi/Mazzi 2008), introductions and conclusions of English and Italian historical research articles have been investigated taking into consideration the different textual voices therein involved. In this study, we continue this line of work by comparing their structure and their textual voices. These liminal spaces are conceived as the gateways that give historians an access to their colleagues’ works and show the rhetorical traditions of local disciplinary communities. Hence, they seem to be the ideal research objects for identifying cross-cultural variations and similarities. In fact, the transnational and national analogies and differences are thought to be useful for enhancing the disciplinary debate on the teaching of academic discourse across languages and cultures and the awareness of both the general and the peculiar features of RAs. In order to detect them, the methodological approach integrates the tools of genre studies and of corpus linguistics, thus combining a quantitative and qualitative analysis, in order to examine two sets of small comparable corpora of openings and conclusions derived from English and Italian RAs. The results reveal that the rhetorical structures of the openings and of the conclusions are similar in English and Italian RAs: openings start from a specific fact and move to general observations, partly following Swales’ CARS model, while conclusions are characterized by a move that can be defined “Recapitulation and synthesis”. Dissimilarities emerge when the textual voices are concerned: borrowing Bakthin’s terminology, English openings and conclusions are mainly “dialogic” whereas Italian openings and conclusions are essentially “monologic”. The epistemology of historical research articles is then similar but they have different forms of dialogism.

2012 - LINKD 2012 Workshop - Language(s) In Knowledge Dissemination. Modena, 11-13 October 2012. University of Modena and Reggio Emilia [Altro]
Bondi, Marina; Cacchiani, Silvia; Seidenari, Corrado; Sezzi, Annalisa; Sorrentino, Daniela; Diani, Giuliana; Poppi, Franca
abstract

Knowledge Dissemination (KD) has become increasingly important in modern society for the socio-economic and cultural development of citizens. The issue of how experts communicate their specialist knowledge to lay-people has been widely discussed in the press and is often tackled in terms of "translating" otherwise exclusive knowledge into more comprehensible language. Comprehensibility can be seen as a matter of simplification, explicitation or formulation in terms that are suitable to the level of knowledge of the addressee. The issue can also be studied in terms of re-contextualizing knowledge. As the applied linguistics literature on popularising is not extensive, useful indications can come from studies on intercultural communication, when looking at KD as "mediation" of knowledge between members of different communities, each with their peculiar cultural and communicative practices. KD can be seen as an example of "inter-discourse communication" i.e. communication that cuts across the boundaries of discourse communities characterized by different types of knowledge. While the issue of KD has often been studied in relation to sciences that require exclusive expertise - e.g. chemistry or physics, the LINKD workshop would like to consider both "hard" and "soft" sciences. The objective of the workshop is to explore the language processes involved in KD in a theoretical, descriptive and applied perspective. In particular, it aims to provide a clearer definition of the nature of popularizing discourse, by means of an analysis of its strategies across disciplines and languages, also including the discursive construction of professional identity and intercultural communication, a closer lexical investigation of specific domains, the deployment of lexicographic tools and an investigation of the use of visual elements in popularisation. Two complementary strands of linguistic investigation - corpus analysis and genre analysis - will be brought together to ascertain how far KD is actually characterized by intense use of metadiscourse, forms of readers' engagement, systematic use of definitions, reformulation, higher degrees of explicitness, careful use of word-image relationship. The basic strands of analysis concern: i) intralinguistic analysis of the recontextualization process that leads from a specialized texts to its popularization outside the circle of domain-specific experts; ii) multilingual analysis of the internal features of knowledge dissemination, aimed at defining its strategies in different genres, media, domains; iii) thematic exploration of the multiple formats of KD, ranging from introductory readings to scientific reports, travel literature or children's books.

2012 - Strade con e senza uscita: immagini come cartelli stradali nei percorsi traduttivi [Articolo su rivista]
Sezzi, Annalisa
abstract

Nel 1974 esce Where the sidewalk ends, una raccolta di poesie per bambini del poeta e illustratore americano Shel Silverstein. Vent’anni dopo l’editore italiano Salani pubblica la traduzione del volume, mantenendo inalterato l’impianto grafico, con il sorprendente titolo Strada con uscita. Mentre in inglese si parla di un marciapiede che si interrompe, in italiano sembra invece che non ci siano barriere alla prosecuzione del cammino. La cosa è ancor più sorprendente se si considera che in entrambi i volumi si utilizza la stessa immagine di Silverstein, due bambini e un cane sull’orlo di un precipizio, che inequivocabilmente è una strada interrotta. Che cosa è successo? I traduttori sono incespicati e caduti loro stessi nel precipizio? In un baratro traduttivo? Oppure hanno tradotto il titolo in modo che, proprio in virtù dell’evidente contrasto tra immagine e testo, si venisse a creare un testo nuovo e chiaramente ironico?

2011 - A Bear called Paddington o L'orso del Perù: tradurre il problema dell'immigrazione e dell’assimilazione in Gran Bretagna [Capitolo/Saggio]
Sezzi, Annalisa
abstract

A Bear called Paddington rappresenta in nuce le dinamiche di potere e controllo tra la Gran bretagna e le ex colonie nel periodo post-imperiale (Hunt, Sands 2000; Smith 2006) attraverso la storia dell'orsetto Paddington che emigra in Inghilterra dal Perù. Questo capitolo intende analizzare il ‘viaggio’ di Paddington nella prospettiva del luogo di destinazione, l'Inghilterra poiché the centre, the imperialist coloniser, has not been extensively considered in this context (quello degli studi coloniali e post-coloniali)’ (Hunt, Sands 2000: 41). Analogamente l'analisi della traduzione del libro permette di riflettere sul sottile equilibrio tra addomesticamento ed estraniamento (Venuti 1995) nella traduzione per ragazzi; equilibrio che, in questo caso, rappresenta la condizione stessa del protagonista. Il viaggio e l'arrivo implicano però confini che non sono solo geografici, ma anche culturali e ideologici, come rivelano sia il libro dedicato a Paddington sia la sua traduzione.

2011 - Bariery literatury dla dzieci. Recepcja ksiazek obrazkowych we wloszech a kwestia glosnej lektury [Articolo su rivista]
Sezzi, Annalisa
abstract

The article opens with the idea of the international “republic of childhood” without geographical and political borders, as conceived by Hazard and promoted after the Second World War. According to O’Sullivan (2004, 2005), this concept of childhood, and consequently of children’s literature, is idealistic and does not address real problems connected with the process of translation. As a matter of fact, the translation of a book for children from one language into another is not as easy as it might seem: frontiers and custom-houses do exist (Bertea 2000: 94). A peculiar cas limite is represented by the reception of the picture book in Italy: introduced thanks to the pioneering work of the publishing-house Emme Edizioni and of its translators, the genre was then rejected. Italy had to wait a decade to see the same and similar picture books republished, but it is still paying the price of this initial closing of the borders, which happened even though the translators paid custom-duties and import-duties. These depended not only on the prevailing child image held by the Italian society, but also on the different image of the adult, who was going to read picture books aloud and who was ready to put on a performance for the child reader (Oittinen 2000). In particular, examples of the discrepancy between the adult and the child images of the source texts and of the target texts selected from American and English picture books and their Italian translations will be investigated.

2011 - From Ninni Puf to Uini il Puh: translations of a classic in the making [Capitolo/Saggio]
Bondi, Marina; Sezzi, Annalisa
abstract

Since its publication in 1926, Winnie-the-Pooh by A. A. Milne has been a never-ending source of rewritings. The aim of this paper is to analyze its two first Italian translations, so as to get a sense of how translations can reveal how a book of children's literature establishes itself as a classic. The first Italian translation of Winnie-the-Pooh is dated 1936 and was issued by the publishing house Il Genio (Rome). The translator is Lila Jahn and the title is L'orsachiotto Ninni il Puf. The second translation in chronological order was issued by the same publishing house 13 years later, in a translation by Elda Zuccaro, under the title Uini il Puh. By focusing particularly on proper names, wordplays and other elements typical of children's books, a plausible hypothesis can be formulated: the second translation seems to be a sort of philological rectification of the first one, after the book had achieved huge popularity around the world and was on the verge of being recognized as a classic of children's literature.

2010 - And what is the use of a book,” thought Alice, “without pictures or conversation?: the marginalized centrality of picture books [Articolo su rivista]
Sezzi, Annalisa
abstract

Picture books are graphic narrative expressions consisting of drawn stories where many codes interweave. On the basis of examples from contemporary English and American picture books, it is shown how they exploit the multifaceted interplay between words and illustrations.

2010 - Luca, la luna e il latte: i vincoli del tradurre un poema pittorico [Capitolo/Saggio]
Sezzi, Annalisa
abstract

Il traduttore di libri per ragazzi, come scrive Ragusa (2002), è ancora più cenerentola di quanto non lo sia il traduttore letterario in generale poiché rientra ina una sottocategoria che è perfino più misconosciuta di quella del traduttore di testi destinati agli adulti. E questo a causa dell'opinione comune per cui i libri per ragazzi sono più semplici da tradurre. Ma esiste una sottocategoria della sottocategoria, un traduttore ancora più Cenerentola: sono i traduttori che si occupano di libri per bambini in età prescolare, quindi paradossalmente per "non lettori", o meglio per i "non ancora lettori". Gli albi illustrati, o picturebook, rientrano in questa tipologia di loibri e proprio a causa delle loro caratteristiche - la presenza di immagini a tutta pagina e testi verbali molto brevi - sono visti come testi la cui traduzione non presenta particolari difficoltà. In realtà specco ci si trova di fronte a veri e propri poemi pittorici (Nièeres-Cheverel 2003). Questi testi multimodali pongono di conseguenza numerosi e a volte insuperabili vincoli al traduttore e la loro traduzione costituisce un campo specifico che richiede competenze specifiche.

2009 - Mediating between Childhood and Adulthood: The Translation of Picture Books [Capitolo/Saggio]
Sezzi, Annalisa
abstract

This paper examines the role of the translator of picturebooks as mediator between different images of childhood and adulthood. It first attempts to investigate the reasons behind peripheral and marginalized position of the translation of picturebooks, despite picturebooks' social and educational funtion. Secondly, this article discusses the importance of the child image held by a determined society, seen as a guiding principle of the translator's work. Finally, it will be argues tha the translations of this form of entertainment of youth might also show a different image of the adult given that picturebooks are meant to be read aloud by an adult reader while the child looks at the images.

2009 - The translation of pre-school picturebooks: towards a different child image and of a different voice of the adult aloud reader [Relazione in Atti di Convegno]
Sezzi, Annalisa
abstract

The translation of pre-school picture books is characterised by a distinctive feature: the voice of the adult reading a picture book aloud to a child is shaped by the text itself. This often poses problems for translation. In fact, while the conciseness and the apparent simplicity of the written text, together with the fact that the books’ format and the illustrations remain practically unchanged, may lead one to believe that no considerable modification can be introduced in their translations, it will be argued that several changes frequently occur, many of which depend not only on the different images of the child intended by source and target texts, but also on different images of the adult dealing with the book and thus with the child. In particular, a selection of Italian translations of American picture books published in the 1960s and the 1970s – the period of the emergence of modern picture books – will be analysed.

2008 - “Bridging the Sensorial Gaps: Theory and Practice in Translating the Voice of the Adult Aloud Reader in Pre-school Picturebooks” [Capitolo/Saggio]
Sezzi, Annalisa
abstract

The translator of picturebooks has to cope with many considerable textual demands as they, being conceived for an oral rendition, seriously challenge his/her ability, even if their structure can deceive. Within the lines of their full-page images and within their other visual and verbal elements, there can be found directions which build up the story to be read aloud by the adult. As picturebooks are aimed at illiterate children, this sort of instructions, guiding the aloud reading of the story, are absolutely essential for the text fruition but the translator is not always aware of their presence or able to face the, leading in this way to performative or stylistic contradictions.

2007 - Fabiola e l’inversione del cronotopo dantesco [Articolo su rivista]
Sezzi, Annalisa
abstract

L'articolo verte sull'analisi del romanzo Fabiola or the Church of the Catacombs (1857) appartenente al genere dell'Early Christian novel. L'utilizzo del cronotopo dantesco come griglia di analisi permette di interpretare il romanzo alla luce del periodo storico in cui fu scritto, il Catholic Revival.