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Pino Cacucci is a well-known Italian travel writer and translator.
On the one hand, translation and travel writing can be compared in cultural terms for relating different linguistic and cultural contexts. Actually, translators and travelers, knowing both linguistic and cultural codes, try to conciliate the differences in order to make the source language and the corresponding culture understandable for the target readers. To do that, they can choose among an ample gamut of strategies, each one of which represents a certain degree of exoticism or domestication (Venuti, 1995) of the foreign culture, according to election to maintain source culture-specific elements in their original form or adapt them to the target language and culture, respectively. In this sense, borrowed foreign words can be seen as a product of cultural contact that can be used to test authors’ and translators’ position towards otherness and their acceptance of the foreign (Mattioli, 2018): The greater the presence of foreign words, the greater translators’ or travel writers’ acceptance of the otherness; the less the use of foreign elements (substituted by patrimonial words), the greater the attempt to domesticate otherness and bring it closer to the target culture and language through adaptations or translations.
On the other hand, despite their similarities, literary translation and travel writing present a different social prestige, occupying different positions within the literary polysystem (Even-Zohar, 1990). In fact, despite translated literature is always more peripherical than the original one and its position depend on both the source language and the target cultural context, translations of famous novels still occupy a more central and dominant position than travel novels that, representing a subordinate subgenre, usually occupy peripherical and marginal places.
From the relation between the conciliating function common to translation and travel writing (Pickford and Martin, 2013, Polezzi, 2004 and 2012) in which foreign words assumed a cultural role (Díaz Larios, 2007, among many others) and the different recognition of the two types of novels (translated and travel ones) arises this study. The main objective is the analysis of Cacucci’s behavior facing foreign words in both practices, in order to determine the influence of social prestige on his translation or transposition choices.
With this aim, a corpus-based study is realized comparing three texts: Le balene lo sanno (Cacucci, 2009), an Italian novel about a travel to Mexico; Soldati di Salamina (Cercas, 2002), a Spanish novel translated into Italian by Cacucci and Bersaglio Notturno (Piglia, 2011), an Argentinian novel translated into Italian by Cacucci. The exam, applied to each novel separately, is compound of three phases: identification of foreign words through word and concordance lists; determination of the transposition technique used in each case (retention of the foreign word, translation, adaptation, omission, etc.); comparison of the results among the three analyzed texts.
The outcomes show that the different social prestige of the two types of novels does influence the author’s choices. Actually, Cacucci seems to prefer exotic techniques to translate the more canonic and accepted novels (55% of the examined ones) and domesticating techniques for his travel novel, more marginalized and less recognized (60% of the studied cases). Moreover, the comparison between the two translated novels highlight the influence of the different prestige of Spanish and Argentinian languages and cultures, showing that Cacucci’s behavior is also affected by the broader social recognition of the European Spanish vis-à-vis to the Latin American one (retaining 70% and 38% of foreign words, respectively).