This paper investigates differences in the language of articles published in Italian newspapers
translated from foreign languages compared to the language of articles originally
written in Italian. To this end, a corpus was compiled of approximately 1.9 million
tokens composed of two subcorpora (translated and original) weighted according to different
criteria (length and number of articles, distribution in time, number of
authors/translators). By means of text analysis software, analyses were conducted to
identify language traits related to source language interference and translation universals.
Although the combined influence of source language, translation universals and
stylistic conventions of the text genre under scrutiny makes it difficult to attribute findings
to a specific factor, it seems clear that translators are less subject to the influence of
English and the innovative traits of contemporary Italian than is the case for journalists
