- Corpus-based studies of translation between English and Italian, focusing in particular on phraseology and translation strategies applied to phraseology.
This topic was dealt with in detail in my Doctorate thesis, completed in 2008 under the supervision of Kirsten Malmkajaer, in which I proposed a method for the investigation of collocations in original and translated language English/Italian.
- Research on non-native or "mixed" communicative conditions (i.e. instances of translated or lingua franca usage).
The aim here is to test the hypotheses put forward in the last two decades about the existence of so-called "translation universals", observing regularities in bordering discourse production settings such as non-native language use, where language contact occurs at the level of writer competence rather than the textual level. A particularly interesting area of research recently focused upon is institutional academic English as a lingua franca published on the web by universities in Italy and other non-English speaking European countries (e.g., degree course descriptions). As well as being of theoretical interest in itself, this is an especially strategic research topic given the role of English language communication for university internationalization.
- Construction and use of corpora for professional, pedagogic and research purposes.
This includes small specialised corpora assembled by/for translators for specific tasks, large general corpora for reference purposes, whose construction requires substantial hardware/software and complex algorithms, and hybrid typologies resulting from collaborative writing and translation practices on the Web (cf. Wikipedia corpus project). I have also focused on the problem of evaluating such resources with respect to the "traditional" corpus resources built in the 1990s, and on their usability in specific areas such as bilingual lexicography and translation.
