Verso una letteratura body positive: proposta di traduzione del memoir Big Girl: How I Gave Up Dieting and Got a Life di Kelsey Miller

The purpose of this dissertation is to present the translation from English into Italian of selected chapters of the memoir Big Girl: How I Gave Up Dieting and Got a Life by Kelsey Miller. It tells the issues that led the author to compulsive eating and compulsive dieting, and narrates the struggles she went through trying to reduce her fat body. Moreover, the story focuses on her experience following a method called ‘Intuitive Eating’ to achieve a healthy relationship to food and self acceptance. The first chapter begins with a consideration about Western attitudes towards body image. Afterwards, it presents an analysis of the social, cultural and historical context that led in the USA first to the establishment of a culture that idealizes the thin body, and then to the birth of a movement for fat acceptance The second chapter deals with the oppression women feel because of this fat-shaming mindset, providing examples of positive body images in feminist literature and negative body images in post-feminist chick lit. Furthermore, this chapter presents as well a new trend within chick lit to star fat women who feel comfortable with their bodies. This kind of literature can be defined as ‘body positive’ and includes Kelsey Miller’s memoir. The third chapter provides a brief biography of the author, followed by an analysis of Big Girl at different levels in order to identify the main characteristics of the book. The fourth chapter contains a description of the content of each chapter selected from the book and presents the actual translation into Italian. The fifth chapter discusses the main strategies used during the translation process and illustrates the most relevant problems encountered, providing examples from the text, as well as the solutions applied to solve them.