Quality in Published Italian Specialised Translations

Based on the study of a corpus of Italian translations and original Italian texts in the fields of economics and physics, this article focuses on the quality of published translations. Both quantitative and qualitative analysis of data suggest that the shift from an ideational to an interpersonal function – a phenomenon previously reported by House – is also found in specialist translation from English into Italian. Translation universals – normalization, explicitation, simplification and leveling-out – are at work in the translations included in the corpus. The paper concludes that quantitative analysis in itself is not sufficient to assess the quality of a translation but must be supplemented by qualitative methods.