Natural translation features in early bilingualism: a case study of an Italian-Russian bilingual teenager

Despite the fact that questions regarding translation in bilingualism have occupied the attention of researchers for several decades, the specific translation strategies of “early” bilingual persons are still not very well understood. Among the causes of this situation is the relative lack of long-term studies of the development of translation skills, which in the case of Russian as a second language is particularly notable. However, the acquisition of more precise data regarding this phenomenon is of great importance not only for cognitive science, but also from the point of view of the effective teaching of translation as a professional activity to young as well as adult bilinguals. In addition, studies to date have usually focused on the detection of errors in translation into the second language. However, as it turns out, the quality of translation into the native language depends, to a large extent, on the degree of bilingualism. This article is a case study, using as its subject for this experiment in translation, an “early” natural bilingual person whose first language was Italian and whose second language was Russian. His translations from Russian into Italian were compared with those of university students and also speakers of Italian who began, by choice, to study Russian in adulthood. Contrastive analysis showed that the natural translator employed a much greater variety of types of transformations, among which were, principally, omission, addition, semantic generalization and substitution, syntactical reformulation and modification. On the other hand, the university students gave priority to semantic accuracy. In addition, the natural translator was more successful in idiomatic appropriateness and achieved greater stylistic and genre competence. His translations were more attuned to the culture of the target language and took more account of the perception threshold of the hypothetical reader/listener. At the same time, the translations of the natural translator showed marked weaknesses such as excessive arbitrariness, linguistically unmotivated application of transformations and overconfidence in the interpretation of the original text.