Resumen de Poetry translators and regional vernacular voice: Belli's Romanesco sonnets in English and Scots
This study investigates how poetry translators tackle source regional voice within their wider approach to poetic text. It analyses eleven translators� �outputs� of Scots and English translations from Giuseppe Belli�s 19th-century regional-language sonnets, which are set in working-class Rome. Each output was coded for voice (space, community, tenor marking), text-world space, and poetic form (rhyme, rhythm), then analysed quantitatively and qualitatively; translator interviews and translators� written commentaries provided extra data. Translators ranged along a spectrum (apparently genre-specific) between two extremes: (1) �relocalising� voice into target regional language/dialect with similar working-class and informal features to Belli�s originals, whilst relocalising place and person names to target-country analogies, and recreating rhyme and rhythm; (2) translating into standard (supra-regional, literary/educated, neutral-to-formal) English, whilst preserving Belli�s Roman setting, but replacing rhyme and rhythm by free verse. This reflects a spectrum between two priorities: (1) creatively conveying poetic texture; (2) replicating surface semantics.
