Professor Sergio Portelli, from the Department of Translation, Terminology & Interpreting Studies of the Faculty of Arts, was invited to the launch of a new book titled Traduttori come mediatori culturali, which he co-edited with Bart van den Bossche and Sidney Cardella from KU Leuven.
The event was organised by the Italian academic publisher Franco Cesati and took place on 10 November at the Libreria Clichy of Florence. The other speaker on the panel was Italian literary translator Giuseppe Girimonti Greco.
The book deals with the challenges involved in the translation process, whereby a text assumes a new identity in the target culture. The seventeen chapters, written by scholars and translators from eight different countries, focus specifically on the role of the translator as a cultural mediator. They highlight the issues experienced by translators from the Middle Ages to the present, their efforts to transpose the source text into another culture and to overcome the problem of untranslatability, their love-hate relationship with texts and with their respective authors, and group translation as an exercise in collaborative mediation.
