"DIARY OF A SKIN" A university thesis

Abstract

 This thesis is a translation from Spanish into Italian of three chapters of a book entitled Diario de un skin and written by Antonio Salas. He is a Spanish reporter who has worked –throughout his life -as an infiltrate in different and dangerous environments, such as the prostitution and white slavery or international terrorist groups. In this specific case, he infiltrates the Spanish skinhead community, discovering a connection between the Nazi hooligans of the association Ultras Sur and Real Madrid football club. The translating work of this journalistic text has been developed aiming at the «naturalness», namely the transmission of the same message in order to reach the same effect that the original text caused to the readers of the source language.

After the translation of the preface and the chapters one, two and nine, it has been analysed in some linguistic perspectives, with a comment divided into three chapters. The first one concerns the different methods and techniques of Spanish Italian translation, opposing the «literal» and the «idiomatic» translations, two diverse strategies that a translator can choose when he/she has to carry out a work. The other translating techniques mentioned are: the borrowing, the calque, the transposition, the modulation, the equivalence and the adaptation. All of them are linked with the problem of the transmission of the message from a language to another, which entails also the comparison between two different cultures and two different organizations of the linguistic system and the reality.

The second chapter is a brief analysis of the colloquial Spanish, an important topic which continues to be debated by many authors. It can be defined as an informal register and it has got four factors –campo, tenor, modo and tono– and several characteristics that determine its linguistic constants. There are several examples of these constants in the lexicon, syntax, pragmatics and phraseology of the present text and its dialogues; for each category it can be found a variety of typical expressions and structures: all-purpose words, derivation, order of the words, deixis, discourse markers and interjections.

The third chapter is about neologisms, that is to say the process of creating new words in the language in order to respond to the need of expressing objects, ideas, experiences, realities which do not have a denomination. There are several different ways to create new terms, such as through prefixes, suffixes, composition, acronyms, abbreviations and borrowings and there are also different types of neologism, due to the causes and motivations that take to their appearance: stylistic neologisms, denotative neologisms, formal neologisms and semantic neologisms.

 Full Thesis PDF: http://dspace.unive.it/bitstream/handle/10579/2808/835595-1165450.pdf?sequence=2