In LSP translating the production of naturally-sounding, idiomatic target texts
is often taken to mean special attention in the use of terminology. However,
research in the distribution of the elements of the message in different
languages shows that the representation of the information structure is
language-specific and that there are language-specific focus-attributing
positions within the syntactic structure of sentences. In this paper, features of
information structure and focus-attributing positions will be studied in a corpus
of English-Italian translations of popular physics articles and compared with a
corpus of original Italian articles on the same topic to see if the Italian
information structure is used in translation or whether target texts reproduce
the original English information structure. Results will show that translations
use – at least to a certain extent – the original English information structure,
therefore making target texts sound partly unnatural. A number of revision
strategies will be proposed to reinstate a more typical Italian information
structure in order to ensure that the informational value of sentence elements is
preserved and higher-quality LSP translations are produced.
