La competenza comunicativa in giapponese: indagine empirica sulle difficoltà frequenti degli apprendenti italofoni in interazioni orali

Smooth intercultural communication requires very complex tasks, especially when participants are very different in their cultural and linguistic backgrounds: this is the case of native Italian and Japanese speakers. A further difficulty in such a context can be found in the usage of a foreign language not mastered perfectly by speakers, which is the case for Italian intermediate learners of Japanese. The aim of this study is therefore to identify the linguistic difficulties common among Italian learners of Japanese as a foreign language and to further examine the consequences of incorrect pragma-linguistic deliveries in actual conversations. To this end, a series of linguistic aspects selected on the basis of the author's experience have been taken into consideration. Some aspects are expected to be difficult to master because of linguistic differences between Italian and Japanese, while some may be difficult due to their connection to the specific Japanese cultural context. The present study consists of six parts. The Introduction presents the state of the art on the research topic and defines the purpose of this research. Chapter 1 outlines the linguistic aspects of the Japanese language investigated in the study, specifically focusing on the following topics: writing system, phonology, loan words, numbers, ellipsis, levels of speech and honorifics. Chapter 2 presents an overview of the environment of teaching Japanese as a foreign language in the university setting in Italy. In Chapter 3 the first phase of the research is described, i.e. an online survey aimed at identifying the most problematic linguistic aspects. Chapter 4 presents the second phase of this study: a series of oral interactions between Japanese and Italian native speakers, conversing exclusively in Japanese, focusing on the management of misunderstandings with the use of actual linguistic data. The Conclusion outlines the results and possible future developments.

Lo sviluppo linguistico (L1): L'acquisizione degli articoli nei bambini italiani e spagnoli

This project focuses on the acquisition of Italian and Spanish as mother tongues. Chapter 1 explores some of the main theories concerning language acquisition in order to give a general overview about this field of investigation. Chapter 2 presents the main steps of the acquisition of Italian and Spanish during childhood as described by Camaioni (2001) and Hernández Pina (1990). Chapter 3 contains an analysis carried out on several transcripts of natural conversations between children and their parents. Particular attention was paid to understand how Italian and Spanish children acquire definite and indefinite articles between 18 and 30 months of age. The goal of this paper is to understand whether Italian and Spanish children follow the same pattern of language acquisition when articles are considered, given the undoubtable similarity of these two Romance languages. The results of this study suggest that the acquisition of articles by native Italian and Spanish speakers mirrors such similarity. Yet, Spanish children seem faster at learning new uses of articles (i.e. articulated prepositions), but at first they make many more mistakes compared to Italians. This suggests that Spanish children tend to make experiments with the linguistic items they already know in order to increase their linguistic competences. On the other hand, Italians seem slower at learning new features of their mother tongue, but the number of mistakes they make is generally lower, which suggests that they rather stabilize their competences before learning new ones. The analysis also highlights the importance of imitation in the process of language acquisition: children tend to repeat what they hear from their parents to learn new features of their mother tongue. Needless to say, this paper only aims at serving as a springboard for further investigation, since language acquisition remains a fascinating and largely unsolved process.

L'interpretazione a distanza: Analisi di interazioni telefoniche mediate da interprete

Interpreter profession is currently changing: migration flows, the economic crisis and the fast development of ICTs brought unexpected changes in our societies and in traditional interpreting services all over. Remote interpreting (RI), which entails new methods such as videoconference interpreting and telephone interpreting (TI), has greatly developed and now sees interpreters working remotely and being connected to service users via videoconference set up or telephone calls. This dissertation aims at studying and analyzing the relevant aspects of interpreter-mediated telephone calls, describing the consequences for the interpreters in this new working field, as well as defining new strategies and techniques interpreters must develop in order to adjust to the new working context. For these purposes, the objectives of this dissertation are the following: to describe the settings in which RI is mostly used, to study the prominent consequences on interpreters and analyze real interpreter-mediated conversations. The dissertation deals with issues studied by the Shift project, a European project which aims at creating teaching materials for remote interpreting; the project started in 2015 and the University of Bologna and in particular the DIT - Department of Interpreting and Translation is the coordinating unit and promoting partner. This dissertation is divided into five chapters. Chapter 1 contains an outline of the major research related to RI and videoconference interpreting as well as a description of its main settings: healthcare, law, business economics and institution. Chapter 2 focuses on the physiological and psychological implications for interpreters working on RI. The concepts of absence, presence and remoteness are discussed; some opinions of professional interpreters and legal practitioners (LPs) concerning remote interpreting are offered as well. In chapter 3, telephone interpreting is presented; basic concepts of conversational analysis and prominent traits of interpreter-mediated calls are also explored. Chapter 4 presents the materials and methodology used for the analysis of data. The results, discussed in Chapter 5, show that telephone interpreting may be suitable for some specific contexts; however, it is clear that interpreters must get appropriate training before working in any form of RI. The dissertation finally offers suggestions for the implementation of training in RI for future interpreting students.