The translation act as a linguistic and cultural process

Abstract

This article focuses on the act of translation as a linguistic and cultural process. A classic work from Italian literature, namely the novel ‘The Betrothed’ - "I promessi sposi" by A. Manzoni, has been selected in order to analyse some linguistic phenomena from the syntactic approach, which arise during the transition from the origin language (in our case, Italian), to the translated language, Albanian. In this novel which was translated twice into Albanian, within 8 decades (previously in the Gheg version, now in the standard of Albanian language), the main argument is observed in the structure of the phrase, without leaving out the features of a lexicon, syntagms and phraseological units. During the elaboration of this research paper, attention has been focused on the syntactic order, on the transformation of communicative units (sentences and clauses), on the semantic adaptation, when translating from the source language to the target language, the forms of words and expressions that are kept not only in the source language, but also in the style of the author, pursuant to the well-known creed "to say almost the same thing". The study is based on a qualitative method approach in order to investigate the techniques and linguistic features, associated with the translation of the literary text. The paper emphasizes that Italian and Albanian have proximity to the verbal system, in one-word sentences in different persons, without the immediate need to place the subject (as they are implied and are determined by verbal endings or context).