Un viaje fascinante a los orígenes del lenguaje humano: cómo una lengua ancestral moldeó como nos comunicamos en la actualidad.Al final de la última glaciación, en las tierras que rodean el mar Negro, nacio una lengua destinada a cambiar el mundo. Aquel idioma ancestral, que hoy conocemos como protoindoeuropeo, se expandio con rapidez, fragmentandose a medida que sus hablantes migraban. De el descienden las lenguas que hoy se hablan en buena parte de Europa y Asia, y que conectan tradiciones culturales tan diversas como el Rig Veda y La divina comedia o la poesia de Rumi. Hoy, las lenguas indoeuropeas conforman la familia linguistica mas extendida del mundo. ¿Como ocurrio esta extraordinaria expansion?Durante siglos, el rastro de esa lengua originaria permanecio oculto, enterrado bajo tumulos en las estepas de Eurasia o dormido en los genes de nuestros antepasados. Solo en las ultimas decadas, gracias a los avances de la linguistica, la arqueologia y la genetica, ha sido posible reconstruir su historia y la de los pueblos que la llevaron consigo.En Lengua madre, Laura Spinney, autora del superventas El jinete palido, recorre continentes y milenios para seguir la odisea indoeuropea. A traves de estepas, montañas y antiguas rutas comerciales, sigue las huellas de quienes propagaron estas lenguas y acompaña a los cientificos que hoy trabajan para recuperar esas voces perdidas. El resultado es una historia de la humanidad contada desde el hilo invisible del lenguaje, que ilumina nuestro pasado y dialoga con un presente en el que pueblos y lenguas vuelven a estar en movimiento.

La scienza ha lo scopo di far progredire la conoscenza nel modo meno indolore possibile, pubblicando congetture e sottoponendole alla comunità mondiale perché le falsifichi. Fino al momento della lor

Without realizing it, you are constantly changing the pitch, cadence, and vocabulary of your voice depending on who you are speaking to. This vocal shapeshifting is not a sign of inauthenticity; it is the "Chameleon Effect," an automatic, hardwired neurological reflex designed to build rapid social cohesion and establish trust.When we interact with someone we like or want to impress, our mirror neurons force our vocal cords to subtly imitate their speech patterns. This subconscious acoustic negotiation instantly signals empathy and group belonging. Conversely, failing to align vocal patterns can accidentally signal hostility or arrogance, subtly sabotaging job interviews, sales pitches, and romantic encounters before the logical brain even registers a problem.This book breaks down the complex sociolinguistics and biological triggers behind unconscious vocal alignment. You will explore how power dynamics dictate who mimics whom in a boardroom, the phonetic adjustments made during attraction, and the evolutionary survival benefits of blending into the acoustic environment of the tribe.Listen closer to your own conversations. Understand the silent, neurological diplomacy of vocal mimicry and how your brain negotiates social status through sound alone.

We live in a digital ecosystem where a sandwich is "epic," a minor inconvenience is "devastating," and every online argument is "toxic." When extreme language is constantly used to describe the mundane, the words completely lose their psychological impact. This phenomenon is known in linguistics as semantic bleaching.In the high-speed attention economy of social media, users are forced to constantly escalate their vocabulary to cut through the algorithmic noise. However, this hyper-exposure acts like a cognitive abrasive. It strips away the nuanced severity of language until the most powerful words in the human dictionary become hollow, meaningless filler. The algorithm demands intensity, but rewards it with linguistic exhaustion.This book analyzes the sociological and neurological degradation of modern communication. You will explore the mechanics of linguistic inflation, the algorithmic incentives driving hyperbolic speech, and the resulting societal inability to effectively communicate genuine crises.Protect your vocabulary from the digital noise. Understand the mechanics of semantic bleaching and learn how to reclaim the precision and power of your everyday language.

In our society people deal with translation quality in various contexts, which seldom share information. The first context one comes into contact with it is university: in bachelors and masters degree translation courses teachers do not evaluate translations by testing linguistic abilities anymore. Translations are now considered as texts in themselves that can be more or less independent from their source texts. Marks, whether expressed out of thirty, twenty and so on assign a quantitative value to the result of a translation process.When a newly graduated translator enter the market, whether she chooses to work as a literary translator or she prefers other kinds of translations (business, advertising or technical-scientific), she must translate an essay. Whether the translator will be hired or not depends on how the employer evaluates the translation. In this case, too, a person evaluates the result of a translation process. What kind of criteria does the evaluator use? Are they the same that went for university?If a translation is published, sometimes it happens that reviews on the target text appear on newspapers or specialized magazines, where one may also find a quick comment on the translators job. In this case, her job is often judged only depending on the result, without having had a look at the source text.Last but not least, researchers in the field of translation science (like us now) deal (also) with translation quality, argue about its being either descriptive or evaluative. Here is another context where translations are evaluated, or at least where one thinks about how they should be evaluated and so on and so forth. In a book I wrote about translation quality (2004) I took into account these issues and tried to arouse the interest of those who work in these different social contexts of translation evaluation. I cannot go back over all the milestones of my reasoning here, as I would like to focus on examples of differences and shifts between source and target text. Should you be interested in it, you may read my book. I will go through different examples from the table about consequences on reception of shifts onwards.

Roman Jakobson has had a strange fate. Everybody knows his name and are willing to recognise him as an important character of the global cultural scene. Few, however, have read what he wrote beyond those four or five famous quotes. Quotes that, taken out of context, might not be understood completely and correctly. The selected works by Jakobson are in eight large volumes. Taking into account that he wrote on various other topics, from Russian literature, to Slavic philology, to phonology, to neurology, the pages devoted to themes that are relevant to translation semiotics are "only" a thousand. It is evident that Jakobson has so many things to tell us about translation and that so far we were quite reluctant to read him.Jakobsons approach to translation is a semiotic one. Someone might wonder what relationship there is between semiotics and translation. What does it matter to a translator the theory of the sign of Saussure or Peirce, since she faces practical texts, not theories? To this I reply with two points:1) all translators, even the most refractory to the theory, follow principles. The reason why it does not make sense "not to be interested in the theory" if you translate is that all translators, perhaps unwittingly, have a theory. We have a theory on how to peel an apple or how to dress pants even if nobody has taught us. We all have a mind whose operation can be parsed, and yet there are people who "are not interested" in psychology. Translation is an activity that inevitably forces its practitioners to think about their target reader, and to formulate a message that takes account of the recipient, and then to draw up a communication strategy. And each translator will read the original document, will process it using her innner mental nonverbal language, and will put out the translated text projecting it onto the receiving culture. Then the difference is between those who knowingly use the theory, and those who use it unconsciously.2) Any conception of translation is like an application program based on an operating system, and in this case the operating system is the theory of the sign. In other words, if you think that between the word dog and the animal in question there is an equivalence relation, you get a given theory of translation; but if you think that between the word "dog," and the animal in question there is a series of creative and non-reciprocal links, then you get a completely different theory of translation.This book comes from my reflection activities connected to my teaching work at Milans Civica Scuola Interpreti e Traduttori Altiero Spinelli and, in turn, will provide study materials for students in the coming years and at the same time, I hope, inspiration for new ideas in the minds of readers.For criticism, comments, messages you can write me at the address b.osimo@fondazionemilano.eu.Milan, July 17, 2016

This book reflects my experience as a translation scholar, and a translation teacher, and a translator from Russian. The knowledge of the Russian language allowed me to read (and translate into Italian) crucial authors like Popovi?, Lyudskanov, Torop, Revzin and Rozentsveyg. Since not many Western translation scholars know them, we get as a consequence a translation theory which is split between West and East according to a sort of cultural Berlin wall.In this book I tried to synthesize both Western and Eastern point of views about the translation process.The terms that are used belong to both worlds.For an explanation of a more professional character, you can use my other book, "Handbook of Translation Studies", available both in paper and in ebook form.I have been teaching translation at the Civica Scuola Interpreti e Traduttori Altiero Spinelli in Milan, Italy, for 30 years, and translation theory for 20 years. My students made an important contribution to this book, through their feedback during lectures and exams. Year after year I had the opportunity to edit my text accordingly.For an explanation of the terms used in this book, I refer students to my Dictionary of Translation Studies.Bruno OsimoMilano, 7 July 2019

Vladimir Nabokov was a major translator and translation theorist. His idea of translation, which resembles his general view of reality, is extremely helpful when it comes to carry out a critical analysis of Chekhovs short stories and an evaluation of the possible translation strategies to adopt. In order to explain the subjectivity of reality, in an interview Nabokov used the example of the lily. The way it is described varies considerably according to the personal perception of who sees it: an ordinary person, a scientist, a botanist. In an excerpt from a 1959 essay, significantly entitled Problems of Flora, Nabokov stressed the importance of precision when a literary translator hasd to render botanical names and comes to the following conclusion: The translator is entitled to use any available term so long as it is exact.

A culture is a way of perceiving reality. Do not be misled by the verb perceive. Some might think that, if the objective reality of a culture is the same, its perception must also be unique for all individuals. But perception is a subjective phenomenon, and what is perceived is not the photograph of reality, but one of the many possible photographs. The individuals experience also influences her perceptive modalities.

Both interlingual translation shifts and poetic production can be seen in a semiotic perspective in terms of mental filtering. The shared ground of the three processes cognition translation versification is to be found in a semiotic perspective: signs (prototext, reality, perception) are interpreted and worked through (mind, interpretants, cognition) and give as an output an object (metatext, poem, worldview). By trying to classify the shifts resulting from such processes distortions with a semiotically shared grid of categories, the hypothesis is that the categories themselves already existing within the separate fields can be reciprocally fine-tuned. The very notion of shift derived from translation criticism, and in particular from the prototext-metatext comparison becomes in this hypothesis a connection transforming the shifts possible in the other mentioned fields into mutual benchmarks.

Translation science is going through a preliminary stage of self-definition. Jakobsons essay On linguistic aspects of translation, whose title is re-echoed in the title of this article, despite the linguistic approach suggested, opened, in 1959, the study of translation to disciplines other than linguistics, semiotics to start with. Many developments in the semiotics of translation particularly Torops theory of total translation take their cue from the celebrated category Intersemiotic translation or transmutation outlined in that 1959 article. I intend to outline here the contributions that the science of translation following a semiotic perspective opened by Peirce and continued by Torop can gather from another discipline: psychology. The totalistic approach to translation provided by Torop can be more deeply enforced by applying to it the consequences deriving from the psychological insight offered by the concept of interpretant as mental sign; the perceptual interpretation of the prototext; reading and writing as intersemiotic translation processes; unlimited semiosis as interminable analysis; primary and secondary process in dreams and in other kinds of translation; metaphor and disambiguation as mental processes; the defenses activated when translation criticism (review) and self-criticism (revision) are made.