The use of set phrases and proverbs is more frequent in colloquial texts, and can be a clue to unveil the speaker’s or writer’s lexical skills. It is commonly said that certain expressions are “untranslatable”, therefore they pose a challenge for translators who need to transpose them in their target languages. The medieval genre of the “volgarizzamenti” is a special case of translation, because the target language is one of the ancient Italian vulgar varieties, often lacking the lexical variety that characterized Latin, the typical source language for “vertical” translations. With the aim of translating correctly, the first “vulgarizers” used Latin-vulgar glossaries which offered fixed correspondences and minimal word pairs: the result was a “translation variety” that was poor in variationes and syntactically close to Latin. However, a skilled scholar like Boiardo, who vulgarized De excellentibus ducibus exterarum gentium by Cornelius Nepos, managed to achieve high-quality translations. By comparing Latin and vulgar expressions, this paper investigates how Boiardo dealt with the (uncommon) fixed expressions of the source text and translated them more freely than he normally did in the case of individual words.
