La traduzione specializzata all’opera per una piccola impresa in espansione: la mia esperienza di internazionalizzazione in cinese di Bioretics© S.r.l.

Global markets are currently immersed in two all-encompassing and unstoppable processes: internationalization and globalization. While the former pushes companies to look beyond the borders of their country of origin to forge relationships with foreign trading partners, the latter fosters the standardization in all countries, by reducing spatiotemporal distances and breaking down geographical, political, economic and socio-cultural barriers. In recent decades, another domain has appeared to propel these unifying drives: Artificial Intelligence, together with its high technologies aiming to implement human cognitive abilities in machinery. The “Language Toolkit – Le lingue straniere al servizio dell’internazionalizzazione dell’impresa” project, promoted by the Department of Interpreting and Translation (Forlì Campus) in collaboration with the Romagna Chamber of Commerce (Forlì-Cesena and Rimini), seeks to help Italian SMEs make their way into the global market. It is precisely within this project that this dissertation has been conceived. Indeed, its purpose is to present the translation and localization project from English into Chinese of a series of texts produced by Bioretics© S.r.l.: an investor deck, the company website and part of the installation and use manual of the Aliquis© framework software, its flagship product. This dissertation is structured as follows: Chapter 1 presents the project and the company in detail; Chapter 2 outlines the internationalization and globalization processes and the Artificial Intelligence market both in Italy and in China; Chapter 3 provides the theoretical foundations for every aspect related to Specialized Translation, including website localization; Chapter 4 describes the resources and tools used to perform the translations; Chapter 5 proposes an analysis of the source texts; Chapter 6 is a commentary on translation strategies and choices

A Cognitive and Cross-Linguistic Approach to Polysemy

Polysemy refers to the phenomenon that a word possesses multiple different but related meanings. Past accounts have provided descriptions of the relations that an extended sense may have to the most central or fundamental ( core ) sense of a word, but they do not provide an explanatory account of how such senses are generated. The current research investigates the cognitive basis for the generation of polysemous senses. I hypothesize that extended senses are built on the salient characteristics of referents of core senses. I also argue that to the extent that speakers of different languages find the same characteristics of default referents salient, different languages should tend to generate similar polysemous senses from the same core senses. Evidence is provided for this proposed language-independent mechanism using data from six psycholinguistic tasks administered to speakers of two historically unrelated languages: English and Chinese. I also propose that, assuming a bidirectional interaction between language and thought, more embodied words should generate a larger number of extended senses and a higher proportion of senses shared between the languages. Evidence is provided for these predictions through the same empirical tasks. Broadly, this project provides a novel avenue for the study of word senses by revisiting the cognitive link between thought and language