Recent research has highlighted a series of peculiar features in translated texts deriving from “linguistic
interference” and the influence of “translation universals”. However, the characteristics of what was termed
“translationese” have been identified and studied only sporadically through the systematic quantitative analysis
of text corpora. The present study is specifically focussed on Italian and is aimed at investigating the language features of a
corpus of newspaper articles collected ad-hoc and compared and contrasted with a similar corpus of newspaper
articles originally written in Italian. The analysis was conducted according to the principles of corpus linguisticsby means of dedicated text analysis software (Taltac2 in particular and TreeTagger). The lexicometric data provided by the software supply the starting material to investigate the lexical features of translated Italian, regardless of the subject matter dealt with in the articles. The analysis of the corpus is not limited to lexical data and is also aimed at identifying the main morphological, syntactic and stylistic traits characterising translated Italian by resorting to computerised language analysis tools and the thorough comparison and contrast with other reference corpora of modern Italian. The results obtained from empirical evidence provides more insight into the linguistic traits of newspaper articles translated into Italian and open new prospects for further research.
