The purpose of this paper is to present the difficulties involved in a comparison
of ltalian and German terms of narratology. The terminological records which
have been compiled for the comparison are going to become part of the
terminological database stored by the SSLMIT of the University of Trieste.
Firstly the article outlines the difficulties provided by the fact that narratology,
a term that was coined in the 1960s to refer to the study of narrative and its
structure, in fact embraces a wide range of approaches, which inevitably leads
to problems of synonymy and polysemy in its terminology. Secondly the article
highlights the vagueness of the concepts underlying numerous narratological
terms, which makes it very difficult to define clearly even the most basic terms
used in the analysis of literary texts, such as "narration", "perspective" and
"focalisation". A final difficulty is provided by the problem of semantic
equivalence that a terminological comparison between two different languages
inevitably provides.
