DeepL traduce Maraini: le poesie metasemantiche "sotto gli occhi" della traduzione automatica

Abstract

This study reflects on the translation of poetic texts characterised by literary occasionalisms by two MT systems: DeepL and Google Translate. A clear example of this is the translation process carried out in the processing of the metasemantic poems in the collection entitled Gnòsi delle fànfole by Fosco Maraini, whose invented words refer the reader to morphological and phonetic components that are known, but often not identifiable as such. By inserting, e.g., the entire text of the famous poem Il lonfo into the translators, these recognise cognitive patterns probably akin to the symbolism evoked by the morphological and phonological characters of the non-words used by the author and transpose these same patterns into non-romantic languages. Even though the final text in the target language is clearly far from a possible literary translation and the mechanism that leads one to pay attention to such textual components is not entirely transparent, the results seem to be in line with possible textual interpretations provided by a human translator. The research is thus aimed at demonstrating how machine translators, when attempting to translate similar texts, can highlight hidden text properties, such as iconic syntactic structures and phonosymbolic components, through statistical text processing.