Italian Texts Research Articles

Constructions with reduplication of the referent in sentences with the relative pronoun который in the translation of «Il regno degli slavi» by Mavro Orbini

The article considers some language features of the translation from Italian made by Savva Ragusinsky in the first quarter of the XVIII century by order of Peter I. The historiographic work under consideration is Mavro Orbini’s book «Il regno degli slavi». The author of the article analyses the use of the construction with the pronoun который and the repetition of the referent, which allows identifying the degree of influence of the original language on the translated text, various transformations within the construction or a gradual departure from it. Savva Raguzinsky, while working on the translation, resorts to using the construction 40 times, not always relying on the original text and often using synonyms, which may indicate its consistent destruction. The paper analyses two manuscripts dating from 1714 and currently stored in the library of the Russian National Library in St. Petersburg, the text published in 1722 «The Book historiography of the Commencement of the Name, Glory and Expansion of the Slavic People ...», as well as the original text in Italian. The relevance of the research topic is due to the significant influence of translations from foreign languages on the formation of a new type of language. It was in the Peter the Great era that texts appeared, the language of which modern researchers call «simple», contrasting with the «high Slavonic dialect». There are practically no Church Slavonic and obsolete forms, words and phrases in it. Until now, a generally accepted view of the linguistic situation of the first quarter of the XVIII century has not been developed, and many printed and handwritten monuments of that time have not become the object of research.

Development of a Natural Language Processing (NLP) model to automatically extract clinical data from electronic health records: results from an Italian comprehensive stroke center

IntroductionData collection often relies on time-consuming manual inputs, with a vast amount of information embedded in unstructured texts such as patients’ medical records and clinical notes. Our study aims to develop a pipeline that combines active learning (AL) and NLP techniques to enhance data extraction in an acute ischemic stroke cohort. Materials and methodsConsecutive acute ischemic stroke patients who received reperfusion therapies at IRCCS Humanitas Research Hospital were included. The Italian NLP Bidirectional Encoder Representations from Transformers (BERT) model was trained with AL to automatically extract clinical variables from electronic health text. Simulated active learning performances were evaluated on a set of labels representing patients’ comorbidities, comparing Bayesian Uncertainty Sampling by Disagreement (BALD) and random text selection. Prognostic models predicting patients’ functional outcomes using Gradient Boosting were trained on manually labelled and semi-automatically extracted data and their performance was compared. ResultsThe active learning process initially showed null performance until around 20% of texts were labelled, possibly due to root layers freezing in the BERT model, yet overall, active learning improves model learning efficiency across most comorbidities. Prognostic modelling showed no significant difference in performance between models trained on manually labelled versus semi-automatically extracted data, indicating effective prediction capabilities in both settings. ConclusionsWe developed an efficient language model to automate the extraction of clinical data from Italian unstructured health texts in a cohort of ischemic stroke patients. In a preliminary analysis, we demonstrated its potential applicability for enhancing prediction model accuracy.

Analyzing Wav2Vec 1.0 Embeddings for Cross-Database Parkinson's Disease Detection and Speech Features Extraction.

Advancements in deep learning speech representations have facilitated the effective use of extensive unlabeled speech datasets for Parkinson's disease (PD) modeling with minimal annotated data. This study employs the non-fine-tuned wav2vec 1.0 architecture to develop machine learning models for PD speech diagnosis tasks, such as cross-database classification and regression to predict demographic and articulation characteristics. The primary aim is to analyze overlapping components within the embeddings on both classification and regression tasks, investigating whether latent speech representations in PD are shared across models, particularly for related tasks. Firstly, evaluation using three multi-language PD datasets showed that wav2vec accurately detected PD based on speech, outperforming feature extraction using mel-frequency cepstral coefficients in the proposed cross-database classification scenarios. In cross-database scenarios using Italian and English-read texts, wav2vec demonstrated performance comparable to intra-dataset evaluations. We also compared our cross-database findings against those of other related studies. Secondly, wav2vec proved effective in regression, modeling various quantitative speech characteristics related to articulation and aging. Ultimately, subsequent analysis of important features examined the presence of significant overlaps between classification and regression models. The feature importance experiments discovered shared features across trained models, with increased sharing for related tasks, further suggesting that wav2vec contributes to improved generalizability. The study proposes wav2vec embeddings as a next promising step toward a speech-based universal model to assist in the evaluation of PD.

Harmony in diversity: exploring cross-linguistic, cross-cultural and multimodal dimensions of temporality within tourism discourse

Abstract This study explores temporal aspects in tourism discourse across modes, languages and cultures, focusing on translated texts in German, Italian, French, English, and Spanish. Tourism communication, a persuasive force promoting destinations, constructs authentic experiences for potential tourists. Beyond promotion, it reflects a societal practice shaping tourist identities and destination cultures. The translation of tourism texts involves considerations of cultural values and multimodal representations, seeking to transfer the unique selling proposition effectively. Existing research has analyzed trigger words, interlingual strategies, and cultural representations, but a gap exists in understanding the translation of temporal aspects. This paper investigates the multimodal representation, promotion, and transfer of temporality in tourism texts, contributing to contrastive and multimodal research in tourism communication. Key questions addressed include how elements from different modes contribute to the unique selling proposition, how the advertising message is conveyed in a multimodal coherent way, and which temporal aspects are translated and adapted in the target language. The present paper sheds light on the intricate interplay of language and image in conveying the temporal dimension of tourist experiences across diverse linguistic and cultural contexts.

A szóbeliségtől az írásbeliségig – és vissza? Jegyzetek Albert Wesselski korai munkássága kapcsán

This paper attempts to present the intellectual legacy of Albert Wesselski (Vienna, 1871–Prague, 1939), a partly forgotten great figure of literary and textual folkloristic comparatistics of the first half of the 20th century, and argues for his timeliness. While he also played an important role as a literary mediator and translator (e.g. translations and interpretations of Boccaccio and Dante, translations of medieval Italian, French and Flemish folklore texts), he was primarily concerned with questions of the origins of European and Asian fairy tales, the problem of the processes of transmission and genre theory. He presented the transnational and transcontinental connections between individual (fairy-tale) texts in his reflections, which were based on his exceptional erudition and knowledge of the material. His views on the essentially literary origins of fairy-tale material were disputed by many in his day, but at least some of them now seem to be confirmed. His comparative method can be an inspiration for those working with folklore and literary texts, both here and now. The present paper attempts to provide a sketchy overview of the early stages of Wesselski’s oeuvre and to inspire further reflection.

Towards the automatic calculation of the EQUAL Candida Score: Extraction of CVC-related information from EMRs of critically ill patients with candidemia in Intensive Care Units

ObjectivesCandidemia is the most frequent invasive fungal disease and the fourth most frequent bloodstream infection in hospitalized patients. Its optimal management is crucial for improving patients’ survival. The quality of candidemia management can be assessed with the EQUAL Candida Score. The objective of this work is to support its automatic calculation by extracting central venous catheter-related information from Italian text in clinical notes of electronic medical records. Materials and methodsThe sample includes 4,787 clinical notes of 108 patients hospitalized between January 2018 to December 2020 in the Intensive Care Units of the IRCCS San Martino Polyclinic Hospital in Genoa (Italy). The devised pipeline exploits natural language processing (NLP) to produce numerical representations of clinical notes used as input of machine learning (ML) algorithms to identify CVC presence and removal. It compares the performances of (i) rule-based method, (ii) count-based method together with a ML algorithm, and (iii) a transformers-based model. ResultsResults, obtained with three different approaches, were evaluated in terms of weighted F1 Score. The random forest classifier showed the higher performance in both tasks reaching 82.35%. ConclusionThe present work constitutes a first step towards the automatic calculation of the EQUAL Candida Score from unstructured daily collected data by combining ML and NLP methods. The automatic calculation of the EQUAL Candida Score could provide crucial real-time feedback on the quality of candidemia management, aimed at further improving patients’ health.

Exploring Negated Entites for Named Entity Recognition in Italian Lung Cancer Clinical Reports.

This paper explores the potential of leveraging electronic health records (EHRs) for personalized health research through the application of artificial intelligence (AI) techniques, specifically Named Entity Recognition (NER). By extracting crucial patient information from clinical texts, including diagnoses, medications, symptoms, and lab tests, AI facilitates the rapid identification of relevant data, paving the way for future care paradigms. The study focuses on Non-small cell lung cancer (NSCLC) in Italian clinical notes, introducing a novel set of 29 clinical entities that include both presence or absence (negation) of relevant information associated with NSCLC. Using a state-of-the-art model pretrained on Italian biomedical texts, we achieve promising results (average F1-score of 80.8%), demonstrating the feasibility of employing AI for extracting biomedical information in the Italian language.

Festmusik mit persönlicher Note

Abstract Festa teatrali were an established music-theatrical means of celebrating courtly festivities around the middle of the 18th century when Margravine Wilhelmine of Bayreuth began to adopt this form at her court. After a brief description of the general development of the Festa teatrale in the context of courtly festive culture, the successive appropriation and special organisation of the Feste teatrali under the margravine, who herself provided the textual basis for two works, will be discussed. The status of the printed French prose version will be analysed in this context. It is not a translation of the Italian text set to music, as was usual with bilingual printed libretti, but a version that preceded it in the creation process. The article clarifies to what extent this version can claim its own aesthetic value, how it can be categorised in literary genre traditions, and how Wilhelmine von Bayreuth positions herself as an author.

Un computo astrologico in volgare del secolo XII

Abstract Now in the British Library, MS Harley 5402 is a collection of astrological treatises from different sources. It consists of two groups of texts, with the first, penned by a 12th-century professional Italian scribe, covering folios 1r-69r, and the second, added in the 14th century, running from folio 70r to 104v. Acting as a watershed between the two parts, folio 69 contains three short texts added by non-professional hands in a deplorable Latin, strongly influenced by the vernacular (Italian and Occitan). – A fourth text, in a variety of Old Italian, was inserted by yet another non-professional hand, with all elements pointing to the city of Pisa in the second half of the 12th century: this conclusion is supported by the palaeographic analysis carried out in this article. The Old Italian text, La rasione dele littere Julii inperator, discovered by professor Charles Burnett of the Warburg Institute in London, has resisted every attempt at interpretation until the present day: for instance, efforts to link this “method for calculating the letters of Emperor Julius” to the Julian calendar with its Dominical letters have proved fruitless. What is clear, however, is that we are looking at the oldest known specimen of Italian scientific prose.

Are Emotions Conveyed Across Machine Translations? Establishing an Analytical Process for the Effectiveness of Multilingual Sentiment Analysis with Italian Text


 
 
 Abstract Natural language processing (NLP) is being widely used globally for a variety of value-creation tasks ranging from chat-bots and machine translations to sentiment and topic analysis and multilingual large language models (LLMs). However, most of the advances are initially implemented within the English language framework, and it takes time and resources to develop comparable resources in other languages. The advances in machine translations have enabled the rapid and effective conversion of content in global languages into English and vice-versa. This creates potential opportunities to apply English language NLP methods and tools to other languages via machine translations. However, although this idea is powerful, it needs to be validated and processes and best practices need to be developed and kept updated. The present research is an effort to contribute to the development of best practices and an evaluation framework. We present a systematic and repeatable state-of-the-art process to evaluate the viability of applying English language sentiment analysis tools to Italian text by using multiple English language machine translation mechanisms such that it can be easily extended to other languages.
 
 

Le lingue del cibo: parole e testi dal cantiere dell’AtLiTeG

This paper describes the project (PRIN 2017) titled Atlante della lingua e dei testi della cultura gastronomica italiana dall’età medievale all’Unità (AtLiTeG). The project aims to reconstruct the history and the geography of Italian culinary texts and their language from the Middle Ages to the unification of Italy. The project consists of the following three main parts: the database/textual corpus (i.e. the verification of the sources with the analysis of the textual traditions through the drafting of new philologically reliable editions); the VoSLIG (Vocabolario storico della lingua italiana della gastronomia); a geotextual atlas which will collect the chrono­logical and geolinguistic representation of culinary terms from the Middle Ages to the unification of Italy in the form of a linguistic-georeferencing atlas, with a distinction between centres of production, texts and traditions for historical phases.

Fenomeni di elaborazione sintattica in Italiano Antico: Il caso della subordinazione a verbo non finito

This paper aims at providing a discussion on ’Ausbau‘ phenomena and on the influence of Latin syntactic models in the development of ancient Italian in the 14th century. This subject is addressed through the analysis of the characteristics of non-finite subordinate clauses in five ancient Italian texts: three translations from Latin classical texts and two ’original‘ chronicles. The comparison between these two types of texts will highlight the interactions between translations and ’original‘ texts and the relevance of the notion of discourse tradition in the analysis of ’Ausbau‘ phenomena in Medieval Italian texts. Finally, a general typology of the processes of syntactic elaboration and of the relationships between Medieval Italian syntactic structures and Latin models is also provided.

Revealing People’s Sentiment in Natural Italian Language Sentences

Social network systems are constantly fed with text messages. While this enables rapid communication and global awareness, some messages could be aptly made to hurt or mislead. Automatically identifying meaningful parts of a sentence, such as, e.g., positive or negative sentiments in a phrase, would give valuable support for automatically flagging hateful messages, propaganda, etc. Many existing approaches concerned with the study of people’s opinions, attitudes and emotions and based on machine learning require an extensive labelled dataset and provide results that are not very decisive in many circumstances due to the complexity of the language structure and the fuzziness inherent in most of the techniques adopted. This paper proposes a deterministic approach that automatically identifies people’s sentiments at the sentence level. The approach is based on text analysis rules that are manually derived from the way Italian grammar works. Such rules are embedded in finite-state automata and then expressed in a way that facilitates checking unstructured Italian text. A few grammar rules suffice to analyse an ample amount of correctly formed text. We have developed a tool that has validated the proposed approach by analysing several hundreds of sentences gathered from social media: hence, they are actual comments given by users. Such a tool exploits parallel execution to make it ready to process many thousands of sentences in a fraction of a second. Our approach outperforms a well-known previous approach in terms of precision.

The use of subtitles in foreign language teaching

Abstract The aim of this contribution is to assert the role of didactic audiovisual translation as a helpful tool for enhancing metalinguistic skills in a foreign language classroom in Italy; more precisely, the paper will offer an analysis of how foreign language teachers can introduce their students to the idea of sociolinguistic variation, by observing how lexical and morphosyntactic changes can occur in the translation process from an Italian source text into an English target text and/or vice versa. The following sociolinguistic variables will be examined through the lens of audiovisual translation, applied to a range of text types including films and an opera libretto turned into surtitles in English: (1) diamesic variation, making students reflect on such aspects as coarse expressions and taboo words, in relation to the Australian film Ned Kelly; (2) diachronic variation, exploring the multidisciplinary possibilities offered by opera surtitling with a focus on the opera Falstaff by Giuseppe Verdi; (3) diatopic, diastratic and diaphasic variations, commenting upon some examples from the Italian films Mio cognato (My Brother-In-Law) and L’uomo che comprò la luna (The Man Who Bought the Moon).

Entendre ces silences : traduire, transmettre et refléter Entendez-vous dans les montagnes… de Maïssa Bey, en italien et en anglais

Listen to those silences: translating, communicating and reflecting Entendez-vous dans les montagnes…by Maïssa Bey, in Italian and English
 Maïssa Bey is a French-speaking Algerian writer whose first works were published in the 1990s, during the "black decade" of the civil war that ravaged Algeria. Algerian people, especially women, of whom the author is an integral part, are the protagonists of her stories and novels that aim to break the silences and censorship, to explore the small stories hidden behind the big story. This article aims to analyse the Italian and English translations of Entendez-vous dans les montagnes..., a novel published in France in 2002 and in Algeria in 2007. The Italian translation, published by Astarte in 2020, is by Barbara Sommovigo, who had already translated Bey’s Puisque mon coeur est mort in 2013, initiating an almost paradigmatic author-translator relationship that allows for an effective approach to a short but complex text like Entendez- vous dans les montagnes... The English translation is by the American Erin Lamm, and is the result of her doctoral thesis, with a clearly more academic intention than the Italian text, whose publishing house Astarte aims to communicate voices from the shores of the Mediterranean. In fact, Bey's work travels between two languages and therefore between two cultures, the French and the Algerian, which intersect in the pages of the story like the lives of the three protagonists. An Algerian woman, an elderly Frenchman and Marie, a young blond woman, meet in the same compartment of a train to evoke memories and thoughts, which lead them to the past and recent history of Algeria, through painful pages among which is evoked the loss of the author's father, killed in 1957 by French soldiers. It is a difficult task for the translators to render this multiplicity of themes and languages from the title: for a French-speaking reader, there is a strong reference to both a line from the Marseillaise and an Algerian patriotic song (Min Djibalina). The Italian title is therefore changed to Dietro quei silenzi…, while the English title is purely literal, Do You Hear in the Mountains... This is just one of the translation choices that will be analysed in this paper, in which the comparison between the strategies and techniques used in the two translation works will be constant, creating a perpetual dialogue with the original text, in the image of the friendship that now exists between the author Maïssa Bey and the two translators.

La Vierge en quête de Jésus pendant la Passion. Entrelacs médiévaux et folkloriques entre l’Italie et la Grèce : rapprochements et questions ouvertes

AbstractAt the center of the study is the motif spread in Italy and Greece, in the Middle Ages and in folklore, of Mary's search for Jesus during the Passion. The historiographical and philological reconstruction of the motif takes its cue from a medieval Italian text, the “Pianto delle Marie marchigiano”, and first investigates modern Italian songs, to show their continuity with the Middle Ages; then the observation expands to the Hellenic “moirologia”, to highlight the strong resemblance to the Italic counterparts; we therefore try to bring these similarities back to historical unity, showing that we are dealing with two forms in which a long-lasting cultural memory persists.

Music editing in the aspect of interdisciplinary connections (according to pages of foreign studies)

Statement of the problem. Editing of a musical work and editorial activity as such is an integral part of the music-historical process. This is the area of musicological activity that, being at the junction of composer creativity and performing interpretation, can tell a lot: to point out the peculiarities of the genre in a certain historical period, to reveal the level of technical skill of the musicians, the canons of the performance style and sound image of the instrument, to mark figurative and substantive priorities. Since the second half of the 20th century, research on the topic of music editing has been spreading, in which the emphasis is placed on the interdisciplinary connections of musicology and philology (Brett, 1988; Bent, 1994; Grier, 1996; Hammond, 2007). In Ukrainian musicology (Hryschenko, 2015; V. & I. Khodorovski, 2016; Zymohliad, 2016: Pankova, 2013; Ekman, 2018; Zapevalova, 2021 and other), music editing was mostly considered on the materials of piano works through the analysis of the work of musician-editor on a music piece. Objectives, methods, and novelty of the research. However, we note the insufficiency of disclosure of this direction that requires further in-depth study. This determines the relevance and novelty of the article, which include systematized analytical results of research of the second half of the 20th‒beginning of the 21st century on the issues of music editing, in the aspect of connections between musicology and philology. The purpose of the article is to systematize the research materials of a number of foreign authors on the study of the phenomenon of music editing from the standpoint of interdisciplinary connections. The article uses the historical method, which reveals the peculiarities of the origin and formation of the process of music editing and its development as a phenomenon; methods of terminological analysis, generalization and systematization, in connection with the study of the positions of researchers in the disclosure of the above-mentioned problems. Results and conclusion. When developing the idea of interdisciplinary relations – musicology and philology in the field of editing – a Canadian Researcher J. Grier (1996 ) considers the ‘methods of critical assessment’ and ‘composition socialization’ to be the most effective for musicology. The literary term ‘philological monument’ projected by J. Grier onto a musical composition of the past, which consolidated in musical and performing practices on the rights of a canon, is equally important and relevant. In the work by S. L. Hammоnd (2006: 2), which covers the investigation of madrigal vocal art within the context of 15th‒17th century culture, the significant role of the figure of editor is emphasized, which could be played by a performer, a composer, a music teacher, a music publisher or a poet (the translator of the Italian texts). Each of them could complement the original work by their own vision acting as a co author. Consequently, changes and adjustments contributed by the editor were made for the contemporary consumers in order to popularize the musical works. The necessity of musical material distribution, often under the conditions of other cultural traditions, its adaptation to the performance realities of the other period, the pursuit for the interpretation of author’s intentions reflected in the creation of editorial versions directed on socialization of compositions and their further spread.

Dialogic Aesthetics in Boris Zaitsev’s Russian-Italian Text

This article examines the interconnection of the images of Russia and Italy in B. K. Zaitsev’s artistic consciousness revealing their ideal-forming meaning and studying the literary and aesthetic concept of the writer. It is argued that the themes of Russia, Italy, and Florence dominate in the writer’s work, making up the internal semantic unity of his multi-genre texts. The “Florentine text” is interpreted as a local textual subsystem of the “Italian text”, which is a dialogical element of the Russian-Italian text (super-text) created by the writer throughout his artistic life. According to Zaitsev, the city of Dante formed his aesthetic experience, his spiritual, and intellectual identity. Building a dialogue between Russian literature and Dante’s work, Zaitsev follows the philosophical and aesthetic programme of Russian Europeanism characteristic of the Silver Age culture. In the article, the author develops the thesis about the relationship between the image of Russia and that of Florence in the artistic consciousness of Boris Zaitsev. It is demonstrated that the study of Zaitsev’s “Florentine text” provides an idea of the semantic conditionality between the leading Russian and Italian themes in the writer’s work that define his aesthetic concept as dialogical. To achieve this goal, the paper analyses Zaitsev’s artistic and documentary evidence about Florence and the features of his aesthetic reception of the culture of Russia and Italy. The article focuses on the method of literary mnemonics developed by the writer. With its help, Zaitsev creates an authorial version of the myth of Florence in the context of Russian and European literature. The reconstruction of the historical and ideological context of Zaitsev’s work proposed in the article makes it possible to understand the artistic and philosophical nature of his works addressed to Russia and Italy more accurately. As a result of the study, the author determines the structure of the dialogical interactions of imaginative and semantic elements of Zaitsev’s Russian-Italian narrative. Russian and Italian themes that form the dialogical integrity of the Russian-Italian text in the writer’s work are a key aspect of our understanding of B. K. Zaitsev’s artistic concept from the point of view of literary theory and aesthetics.

Interkulturowość w wybranych podręcznikach do nauki włoskiego i angielskiego języka biznesu i ekonomii. Studium porównawcze

This article attempts to characterize three textbooks for learning the language of business and economics in terms of the presence of elements developing intercultural competences. Two textbooks for learning Italian and one for learning English were analyzed: (1) Italiano per economisti, (2) L'italiano in azienda, (3) Market Leader. Intermediate business English. The above-mentioned titles were published in the years 2002-2003, which allowed to eliminate possible differences resulting from the changing over time approach to the phenomenon of intercultural language education. The aim of the study is to identify the elements developing intercultural competences, their qualitative and quantitative characteristics, to discuss the differences in the approach in Italian and English-language texts and to indicate the possibility of using selected solutions in the new teaching materials. This is important as research shows that contacts with foreign cultures alone do not naturally lead to the development of intercultural competence (Sobkowiak, 2015: 64, Budzanowska-Drzewiecka and Motyl-Adamczyk, 2016: 56). The analysis covered non-verbal communication (gestures), stereotypes, proverbs and sayings, rules of linguistic politeness. From the glottodidactic point of view, the proposed types of exercises and the connection of (inter)cultural competences with other communicative competences will be analyzed. The main hypothesis verified during the analyzes assumes that the concept of intercultural language education, although it does not appear as a notion on the pages of textbooks, is an important component of the didactic process in materials for learning the business language, and the approach to interculturality may differ depending on the target culture and status of the foreign language taught (Italian vs English, modern lingua franca).

New Italian version of the Wilkins Rate of Reading Test: Materials for repeated-measure designs in optometry and neuropsychological research.

To develop a series of equivalent passages of text in Italian, according to the principles of the Wilkins Rate of Reading Test (WRRT), suitable for both clinical examination and scientific research when equivalent stimuli are needed to compare performance in repeated-measure designs. Fifteen high-frequency Italian words (matched for grammatical class and length to the English WRRT) were used to generate 15 different 10-line meaningless passages, according to the design principles of the English WRRT. Thirty-two healthy Italian-speaking higher education students read the passages aloud according to a fixed randomisation schedule. Performance was recorded digitally to measure reading speed and accuracy offline. Equivalence between the passages and the practice and fatigue effects for both reading speed and accuracy were examined as well as test-retest reliability. No significant difference in reading speed and accuracy was found between the passages. There was a significant practice effect on reading speed but not accuracy, with the first presented passage read significantly slower than the others. There was no evidence of a fatigue effect. Reading speed, the reference metric for the WRRT, showed good test-retest reliability. The passages of the Italian version of the WRRT were equivalent to each other. The practice effect suggests that familiarisation with the test (i.e., reading at least one matrix of words) should be carried out before consecutive/repeated reading of different passages for experimental or clinical purposes.