Febo Guizzi’s article “Qui connaît Résia et les Résiens? Il Viaggio di Ella von Schultz Adaiewsky e la Nascita dell'Etnomusicologia in Europa’”, which contextualises the ethnomusicologist Ella Adaïewsky’s thinking and explains and evaluates her study against the historical background of ethnomusicological research, is assimilable to an academic register and required a mainly target text (TT) oriented translation approach, given the translation's target readership of international scholars of ethnomusicology. Its Italian stile aulico, with long, complex sentences, sometimes archaic or rare lexical choices and borrowings from classical and other languages, called for some adaptation in English translation. This involved some breaking up of the longer sentences and reordering of their information, and the occasional use of more mainstream English vocabulary, whilst prioritising, wherever compatible with fluency, the author’s many subtle nuances of meaning, in order to retain the depth and breadth of his commentary and analysis, whilst at the same time communicating his passion for ethnomusicology.
The English transliterations of the many ancient Greek musical terms presented a further, technical difficulty of this translation. For these, I relied on Martin West (1992) 'Ancient Greek Music'. Oxford: Clarendon Press and Andrew Barker (1989) 'Greek Musical Writings 1. The Musician and his Art'. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. I also relied on my own previous research on translation (Swain, 2001, 2014) including my final year dissertation for my Laurea in Lingue e Letterature Moderne (Padova, 1995) on DH Lawrence's translations of the Novelle Rusticane of Giovanni Verga.
