Artikelgebrauch in Text und Übersetzung. Beobachtungen zum Sprachenpaar Deutsch-Italienisch

This explorative study sheds light on the different quantitative and qualitative preferences of article usage in German as compared to Italian. Given the language system differences described in the literature and shortly reported, following assumptions will be addressed: in quantitative terms, in Italian originals and German translations a higher frequency of articles is expected, both in all (compared to German originals) and in generic phrases/sentences; moreover, definite articles are supposed to be more widespread than indefinite ones. Empirical evidence to test these assumptions will be provided. In qualitative terms, all occurrences of different realisations of article forms in translations (i. e. different from the grammatical correspondence) in two samples, one for each language direction, will be commented on. Moving from this evidence and remarks, specificities of translation strategies and procedures will be taken into consideration and discussed. The analysis is based on a German-Italian parallel corpus of InterCorp.