This paper presents the initial results of a research carried out on a corpus of Corporate Annual Reports (ARs). Using a methodology which combines tools and perspectives from different linguistic fields, namely Genre and Discourse Analysis, Systemic Functional Linguistics, Pragmatics and Corpus Linguistics, the research studies interdiscursivity in ARs as exemplifications of genre mixing. Specifically, we assume that the documents forming the AR, namely the CEO’s Letter to the Shareholders, the Chairman’s Letter and the Financial Statements, can be considered as representative of genres which provide conflicting representations of the same reality by adopting different communicative strategies. While each genre represents the same corporate facts differently, they shed light on each other, thus enabling the addressees, both shareholders and stakeholders, to make sense of the implicit and explicit messages of the documents. We also assume that the study of interdiscursivity can prove advantageous to linguists and translators, too.

This paper focuses on the role that loanwords (or borrowings) play in economic and financial texts belonging to popular and academic genres. Specifically, the study considers some cases taken from literary (theatre) or popular genres (newspapers articles, cinema); therefore, the language used is expected to be easily understandable by the audience. In fact, the frequent occurrence of loanwords/borrowings and calques tends to make this task harder for members of non-specialized communities. In the case of Italian, for example, texts are today invaded by numberless English words which, to use an economic metaphor, are causing loss to the language capital (Bourdieu 1991), rather than bringing profit.

The exponential growth of international business relations has resulted in the development of rules and laws regulating the relationships between parties from different countries and, as a consequence, of international institutions (e.g. Arbitration Tribunals, Chambers of Commerce) and legal instruments (e.g. international arbitration awards, contracts and power of attorney), intended to safeguard the fairness of transactions. International contracts certainly entail more serious problems than contracts agreed upon at a national level, as different legal systems (e.g. Common Law vs. Civil Law), discourse practices and languages come into contact (Bhatia et al. 2008; Cordero-Moss 2013, 2014). As a result, a number of significant problems arise in terms of translation theory and practice, including issues relevant to the teaching of legal translation, i.e. what methods and tools can be used to teach students, with poor or no knowledge of legal issues, to translate international contracts correctly and knowingly. With that in mind, this paper proposes a methodology to develop legal competences in students attending an MA course in specialized translation at the University of Bari. The methodology is based on the construction of a set of concepts maps (Novak, Cañas 2007) regarding English and Italian contracts, namely distribution agreements. Map-building is intended as a simplification teaching methodology the purpose of which is to easify students’ learning of legal matters (Bhatia 1983) and their encyclopedic knowledge (Evans, Green 2006).

The paper aims at analyzing the discourse of financial and economic crisis. Focusing on the latest scandals that have affected the automobile industry, the paper illustrates the results of research that investigates the discourse strategies used by corporations to manage events of crisis and meltdown. In particular, it delves into the discursive practices used in the ‘Letters to the Shareholders’ by CEOs and/or Chairmen, which are representative of governance genres (Fairclough 2003; Zanola 2010). The methodology adopted in the study is principally based on contributions from pragmatics and crisis communication, as well as critical discourse analysis and corpus linguistics. In particular, it draws upon Searle’s (1976) direction of fit and Hearit’s (2006) Theory of Apologia. An accurate analysis of the illocutionary force conveyed by speech acts and speech act sets demonstrates that the ultimate strategy of corporations to repair their image is not so much apologizing for their wrongdoings, as providing an apologia to disclaim responsibility for the damage they caused.

The growth of economic transactions at a global level has called for a number of new genres which have attracted the interest of scholars from various disciplines, including linguistic and translation studies. Notwithstanding the undisputed role that English plays as the lingua franca in trade, many activities, involving actors from different countries, demand translation between languages. The specificity of the economic domain entails a number of problems relevant to terminology, syntax, text typology and generic structure. To cope with such problems, prospective translators of economic and financial texts must be trained in order to acquire not only linguistic, but also thematic competence. This paper suggests a syllabus designed to train students attending a University MA course in economic translation. The syllabus encompasses methods and tools from various areas of linguistics and translation studies. The initial assumption is that the inclusion in the syllabus of non-professional genres, such as comic books and docu-movies, may boost students’ thematic competence. Although previous research argues that training of translators of economics-based texts benefits from multimodality, in particular from the combination of verbal and visual semiotic modes, surprisingly, practice shows that comic books may be hard to interpret and translate for nonexpert students, whereas films, namely video-tutorials and docu-movies, can enhance their understanding of economic terms and concepts.

L’obiettivo di questo volume è quello di mettere a punto un insieme di strumenti, metodologici e tecnologici, che possano aiutare lo studente in traduzione specialistica, ad adottare un metodo che gli consenta di affrontare testi appartenenti ai generi più diversi nell’ambito del discorso economico. Esso si colloca a metà strada tra la didattica e la ricerca nel campo della traduzione economica, anche se le due cose non devono essere considerate come attività separate in quanto la ricerca contribuisce a migliorare la didattica e quest’ultima, a sua volta, permette, attraverso i suoi continui feedback, a indirizzare la ricerca verso gli obiettivi più utili. Altrettanto complicato è riuscire a cogliere quale degli argomenti è quello centrale, e quali, invece, sono i temi periferici. Tuttavia, esiste un fil rouge che li lega e che mettono in stretta relazione il fine didattico e quello di ricerca, ovvero l’intenzione di soddisfare i requisiti stabiliti dall’Unione Europea, nello specifico dalla Direzione Generale della Commissione Europea, nell’ambito dello European Master’s in Translation, per quanto riguarda le competenze che uno studente in traduzione specialistica deve possedere a conclusione del suo ciclo di studi in traduzione specialistica. In particolare, tutto il volume ruota intorno alla costruzione della “competenza tematica”, ovvero della conoscenza disciplinare da parte dello studente che spesso deve fare i conti con ambiti settoriali estranei alla sua formazione e, per questo, estremamente ostici, sia sul piano terminologico, sia sul piano della struttura di genere. Proprio con questo obiettivo in mente, si è cercato di descrivere, nella prima parte, il contesto che ha favorito l’emergenza della didattica 2.0, ovvero di una didattica che si avvale delle nuove tecnologie dell’informazione per la costruzione della conoscenza, dai corpora alle mappe cognitive, strumenti e approcci innovativi a sostegno dell’insegnamento della traduzione specialistica e della pratica traduttiva stessa, in cui lo studente non è più il consumatore di qualcosa prodotto da altri, ma partecipa egli stesso alla fase di produzione. La seconda parte, invece, è dedicata all’analisi e alla traduzione di alcune parti di un testo appartenente al genere research article. Per quanto riguarda l’analisi, viene utilizzato un approccio che integra metodi diversi, dalla genre analysis di Swales e Bhatia, alla SFL di Halliday, al cooperative principle di Grice; mentre, per quanto riguarda la traduzione, si ricorre a Halliday e agli studi corpus-based. La corpus linguistics, nelle sue innovazioni più recenti, è la protagonista dell’Appendice I, curata da Francesco Meledandri. Lo studio dei corpora viene utilizzato come metodo per creare e compilare dizionari e glossari. A tale scopo, viene utilizzato come case study, il gruppo nominale composto management accounting. L’Appendice II, infine, prova a integrare lo studio dei corpora con le mappe cognitive per dimostrare come modalità diverse di lavoro possano contribuire alla formazione della competenza tematica nel traduttore, sia come studente, sia come professionista

The advent of the New Information Technologies has implied the reshaping of teaching methods and instruments in university and post-university courses, including those in specialised translation. Translation teaching is increasingly influenced by new forms of work organisation, based on community and collaboration, such as cloud translation, collaborative translation and crowdsourcing translation, in which information literacy plays a fundamental role. This paper sums up the fundamental steps of a research project in translation teaching designed for a class of students in economic and financial translation. The project focuses on the need to re-mediate long-established learning methodologies. To this purpose, a case study is described which illustrates how the integration of Web 2.0 technologies into traditional didactic methods might help students develop their thematic competence in a Massive Online Collaboration (MOC) environment.

Against trends in translation studies, which are inspired to a sociology of translation and claim for the invisibility of the translator (Holmes 1988; Venuti 1998), this paper endorses a sociology of the translator (Chesterman 2009) which, by contrast, lays stress on the private and public role of the translator, thus dramatizing their centrality (Halverson 2015) and their situatedness (Risku 2002). Against this backdrop, this paper adopts a methodology, which combines contributions from functional translatology and cognitive translatology in order to demonstrate, through a case study taken from the domain of economic translation, that translation is a speech act or a set of speech acts (Tymoczko 2002), performed by the translator. Depending on the perspective or the deictic centre that they adopt, translators affect the interpretation and the translation of a text, thus affirming their identity and ideology.