Tradurre un corpus di memoria storico-biografica. Strategie di semplificazione e adattamento per il pubblico italiano

The article presents the translation of the FGOP corpus Fluchtgeschichten aus Ostpreußen (refugee stories from East Prussia) from German into Italian, which consists of autobiographical narrative interviews. The interviews were conducted between 2015 and 2017 with Germans from East Prussia and relate to stories of flight and expulsion (Flucht- und Vertreibung) that occurred in the last months and at the end of World War II (Cinato 2020). The approximately ten-hour interviews with three siblings who survived the war with very different experiences are available in the Datenbank für Gesprochenes Deutsch (DGD) of the Leibniz Institut für Deutsche Sprache (IDS) in Mannheim (http://agd.ids -mannheim.de/FGOP_extern. shtml, corpus FGOP, escape stories from East Prussia), and are part of a University of Turin project involving their transcription using the GAT2 system (Selting 2009) as well as their translation into Italian, the latter for the purpose of scientific research dissemination (activities of Public Engagement). On the one hand, my analysis aims to highlight the most important linguistic aspects of the text genre of the narrative autobiographical interview and, on the other hand, to show the translation strategies and difficulties that one encounters when translating. Particular attention is paid to the adaptation strategies necessary for the Italian public, which not only does not know these facts or knows them very little, but also needs explanations and clarifications linked both to the family and to the historical-institutional sphere. Very often, the adaptation also means a simplification of the translated text, due to the many characteristics of the spoken language and the tendency towards standardization and the mitigation of the stylistic and/or sociolinguistic variations inherent in the translations (Toury 1995). In the course of the analysis, selected examples should therefore be used to check what type of adaptation is necessary for this type of text and what simplification strategies can result.