La traduzione scientifica dei testi letterari: verso il rigore e la retroversibilità. Anna Karenina prima e dopo il modello teorico

The last fifteen years, beginning in 2005, have seen the development of a theoretical model for translation that is capable of transforming the amateur approach to literary translation that has been standard in the past to a new scholarly-based procedure (Salmon 2017). The application of this scientific model allows us to obtain a high level of functional equivalence between ST and TT and to minimize entropy — all of the information coded in Russian ST can indeed be re-coded in the TT with sufficient precision to predict a successful back-translation into Russian (if applying the model itself). This paper addresses the project of a scientific “remake” of an Italian translation (TT1) of Anna Karenina (Roma 2004), which was made at the highest possible amateur level before the theoretical model was developed. The new Italian translation (TT2, Milano 2022) pursues the f-equivalence of TT2 to any ST textual element, thereby preventing any solutions inconsistent with either Anna Karenina’s specificity or Tolstoy’s unique choices. The application of the theoretical model is thus a crucial step in the formalization of the literary translation process, which will eventually provide translating with the requisites (leges artis) of any rigorous “liberal profession”. Moreover, the opportunity to compare TT2 with both Russian ST and TT1 offers a new scientific approach for translation critics, as any single mismatch between TT2 and TT1 can be analyzed, described, and argued on the basis of discrete parameters, strategies, and techniques.