JAMES JOYCE’S A PORTRAIT OF THE ARTIST AS A YOUNG MAN. A CORPUS-STYLISTIC ANALYSIS OF ITS ITALIAN TRANSLATIONS AND IMPLICATIONS FOR EFL TEACHING

Abstract

Brian Friel’s concern about the role and the value of the act of translation certainly reminds the reader of James Joyce’s famous words on the cultural – and most of all linguistic – differences between the protagonist of his book and the English headmaster of the school he works at. The present contribution aims at offering a comparative analysis of some of the Italian translations of A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man through a corpus-based approach. Corpora can be used in a classroom of EFL or of Translation Studies, to draw students’ attention towards the various translation strategies and the linguistic information useful in translation and learning process. For such reasons, I intend to show how corpora can aid the learning and understanding of English as a foreign language, making students more autonomous and free to take responsibility for their own learning by looking at aspects such as verb use; lexical contrast (wordlists); syntax (collocates and collocations); clause structure; clause boundaries and cohesion; varieties of English (Irish English) as well as translation strategies.