La retrotraduzione come strumento per l’analisi del significato

In Translation Studies little is known about back-translation, although its application, mainly as a quality assurance method, is widespread within many fields, such as medical-pharmaceutical translation, psychology, cross-cultural research and legal translation. Further applications can be found in language teaching methods, while it is also used to analyse supposedly inaccurate translations, as a tool to retrieve information about lost original texts or the text itself and rarely to examine linguistic and translation phenomena. The objective of this experimental dissertation is to shed more light on the possible outlook of applying back-translation to texts in order to analyse translation phenomena and issues, chiefly in the conceptualization of meaning by author, translators, receivers and text itself. To this aim, the dissertation is organised in two chapters. Chapter II displays the starting material of the analysis and its processing: six back-translations from English and six from Spanish have been produced, all from the same Italian source text and back to Italian, by twelve students. The texts have then been divided into segments and an evaluation of their meaning equivalence has been carried out. The latter is the starting point for the analysis, organised within Chapter III in four sections, one for each perspective: author, translators, receivers, text. This experimental study proves the effectiveness of back-translation in showing the issues of the transfer of meaning, as well as the obstacles posed to it by the different language systems and human factor at each stage of the translation process.