Le colonne d’Ercole della Traduzione

The issue of (un)translatability has been addressed by many of the most penetrating thinkers over time – from Cicero to saint Jerome, from Croce to Gasset – and tackled as a matter of degrees, differently negotiated on the basis of various factors. However, the greatest, sometimes insurmountable, challenges posed to translatability mostly depend on language-specific features, culture-specific items or «extralinguistic cultural references» (Pedersen), and visual cultural specificity as well. In some cases, these features, like in the case of dialect, may also overlap, which makes translation even more problematic, and may thus represent the pillars of Hercules, i.e., the farthermost limits, of translation.