ABSTRACT

This chapter identifies how different strategies through which foreign terms are present in the Italian text position the translingual writer in relation to the cultures and languages of which he or she is master. These strategies can be divided into three main categories whose theoretical models derive from Lawrence Venuti's translation theory, which he outlines in The Translation Studies Reader: thick translation, foreignizing translation, and domesticating translation. Early texts written by authors of Somali origins in Italian employed paratextual remarks to explain and justify the presence of foreign terms, such as footnotes, facing-page translation of the Somali text, and glossaries. The texts that translate the distance in proximity can be described using Jacques Derrida's theoretical approaches to translation. Unlike Rhoda, however, Oltre Babilonia provides in-text translations or in-text contextualization of Somali, Arabic, and Spanish words, and often leaves expressions in Spanish and the Roman dialect untranslated in the Italian text.