(The loan: a process of acculturation [samples from the Arabic literature translated into Italian])

in La rivista di Arablit, a. XII, n. 24, dicembre 2022, pp. 133-156.

When a literary text is translated into the “language of Dante”, it very often carries elements of its original culture while also preserving linguistic formulas. Therefore, the Italian used in any translation – and especially in a translation from Arabic – cannot be “pure” standard Italian, but it is part of the so-called “Italian of translations”. In this sense, in some cases, a loanword turns out to be the best solution to ensure cultural transfer. For an Italian person, reading a novel translated from Arabic means approaching another world and opening up to another culture well different from his/her own. This contribution intends to offer some food for thought on the use of loanwords as a translation technique, focusing in particular on various expressions of this strategy and analysing the effects produced in some examples from Italian translations of novels written in Arabic.