Tradurre la lineetta singola: uno studio contrastivo macedone-italiano
Translating the Dash: A Contrastive Study of Macedonian-Italian

Summary/Abstract: The aim of this article is to illustrate the strategies adopted to translate the dash from Macedonian into Italian in contemporary literary texts. This punctuation mark follows partially different principles in the two languages: morpho-syntactic and informative-textual ones in Macedonian and informative-textual principles in Italian. In addition, the source language reveals a frequent and systematic use of the dash, while it is not very common in the target language nor fully integrated into its punctuation system. From this analysis, two significant data have emerged. Firstly, it has been observed that, amongst the translating strategies of the dash from Macedonian into Italian, what prevails is the use of a “passe-partout” comma, which separates two clauses and replaces stronger punctuation marks, such as the colon, the semicolon, and the period. Secondly, it has been observed that the translation does not contribute to transferring the Macedonian model into the Italian language: the dash of the original text is kept in the target text only when there is equivalence between the two punctuation systems.

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