Introduction - Translation as Interpretation (co-author: F. Camera, Uni Genova)

This brief introduction presents an issue of the journal "Jolma" devoted to the topic of translation, emphasizing that translation becomes an issue, indeed a necessity, when human beings are impacted by the opacity, heterogeneity and historicity of speech acts that bring with them disagreements and misunderstandings, as well as illuminating openings. For idioms are not aseptic verbal instruments; rather, idioms are language and therefore human ways of being-in-the-world; they are practical, culturally determined behaviours within the life-world, that dialogically clash and translate each other until they encounter the boundaries of the shareable. That's why translating is not an occasional task, nor a simple technical remedy for the accidental failure of some speakers to master a foreign language.