Italian Self-Study Group
Saturday June 10, 2006
The Italian Self-Study Group is an informal, online Italian translation course for all levels of proficiency. Each week two or three brief news articles in Italian are presented for translation. Each member of the group submits their translation and can then compare their results online with the rest of the group.
Comments
The Italian Self Study Group is great, all the participants do a good job at translating, but it would be nice to have the definitive translation as well. Any possibility of that happening?
Thanks,
John
That begs the question - does a “definitive” translation of any work of greater than a few sentences actually exist? There are many printed translations of Dante’s Divine Comedy, but none of them is the “definitive” version. Maybe not the most appropriate example due to the poem’s hendecasyllable rhyme scheme and is extremely difficult to replicate in another language. My point, though, is that translating a paragraph/short story/novel is an art that requires subjective decisions in terms of grammar, adjectives, and subtle meaning.
As for the Italian Self Study Group, it’s unrelated to About.com so I suggest you contact the web site directly.
How does this work. Does one log on to get the translations, or are they sent on a news group. Thank you for your response. This is quite interesting.
Have a look at http://zotikos.com/italian/ (again, it’s an external site unrelated to About.com that I’m simply recommending).
Each week there are two short news briefs - one in Italian and one in English. Your assignment is to translate both: Italian into English, and English into Italian. Then submit both translations to the e-mail listed on the site and your work will be added to the site. You can compare your translations to what everyone else has submitted to see how other people interpret various words, phrases, and verb tenses.
There are other instructions on the site as well regarding signing up for the mailing list.
For those who are serious about studying Italian, I think it’s a great method for improving their competency in the language.