"Quo vadis" all’italiana: investigazione stilometrica sulle traduzioni milanesi del bestseller di Henryk Sienkiewicz

• Authors: Biernacka-Licznar Katarzyna , Rybicki Jan

Title variants

EN

"Quo vadis" in Italian: A Stylometric Investigation of Milanese Translations of Henryk Sienkiewicz’s Bestseller

• Languages of publication: IT

Abstracts

IT

L’opera "Quo vadis" di Henryk Sienkiewicz arrivò in Italia alla fine del XIX secolo grazie al traduttore napoletano Federigo Verdinois. Lo scopo della prima parte del contributo è quello di presentare la storia della popolarità del romanzo "Quo vadis" attraverso le azioni delle case editrici milanesi, le quali hanno introdotto l’opera del polacco, in varie forme, nella sua offerta editoriale (come traduzioni, adattamenti, parafrasi, plagi). La ricostruzione della storia delle traduzioni del romanzo romano di Henryk Sienkiewicz è stata possibile grazie al metodo biblometrico che è stato ustato nella prima parte dell’articolo. L’analisi dei dati bibliografici raccolti ha permesso di valutare e descrivere la grandezza e il carattere della popolarità di "Quo vadis" tra gli editori milanesi nella prima parte del XX secolo. Nella seconda parte del contributo per meglio far luce sulle complicate sorti milanesi dell’opera di Sienkiewicz abbiamo usato alcuni metodi d’analisi quantitativa. Abbiamo paragonato il numero delle parole in originale e nelle traduzioni descritte nella prima parte. La ricchezza del vocabolario di tutti i testi esaminati è stata misurata e confrontata usando il calcolo della media mobile del rapporto del numero di parole alla lunghezza del testo (MATTR). Abbiamo confrontato anche le lunghezze delle frasi come serie temporali. I due programmi diversi ("WCopyFind e Tracer"), utili per le analisi delle reti, hanno dato risultati simili per il numero delle somiglianze delle frasi di pentagrammi verbali tra le traduzioni di "Quo vadis".

EN

Henryk Sienkiewicz’s novel "Quo Vadis" made its way into Italy at the end of the 19 th century through the efforts of Neapolitan translator Federigo Verdinois. The first part of this paper outlines the history of the popularity of "Quo Vadis" by focusing on the operations of Milanese publishers that made the Polish novel part of their offer in a variety of ways (as translations, adaptations, reworkings, plagiarisms, etc.). Bibliometric methods are used to establish why so many publishing houses decided to publish Henryk Sienkiewicz’s Roman romance. The analysis of the bibliometric data of the published translations helped assess and describe the extent and the character of the popularity that the novel garnered among Milanese publishers. The second part of the paper relates the findings of a multi-method quantitative study of the same material. The number of word tokens was compared between the original and the translations. The lexical richness across the texts under study was compared by means of the moving average type-token ratio (MATTR). Sentence lengths were also compared, as was sentence length distribution as time series. Two different programmes ("WCopyFind and Tracer") yielded very similar results on the degree of the similarity of five-word phrases in pairs of translations, which was determined in network analysis.

Keywords

IT

"Quo Vadis"; traduzione; editori di Milano; analisi quantitativa; stilometria

EN

"Quo Vadis"; translation; Milanese publishers; quantitative analysis; stylometry

• Publisher: Wydawnictwo Adam Marszałek
• Journal: Italica Wratislaviensia
• Year: 2020
• Issue: 11.1
• Pages: 31-64

Dates

published

2020-07-31

received

2020-02-10

accepted

2020-06-15

Contributors

author

Biernacka-Licznar Katarzyna

• Uniwersytet Wrocławski, Polonia

author

Rybicki Jan

• Uniwersytet Jagielloński w Krakowie, Polonia

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Identifiers

DOI

http://dx.doi.org/10.15804/IW.2020.11.1.02