Interflora

Interflora is about landscape, flora and gardens. It focuses on descriptive passage in Australian, New Zealand, American and Caribbean literatures.  It shows how scientific phytonyms and popular plant names enhance cultural specificity and difficulty in translation. Plant names are a stumbling block when translating into non-colonial contexts (i.e. translating into Italian). It is a challenge for translators when monolingual and multilingual lexicography are often inadequate. Semantic extensions, polysemy, syllepsis, hyponyms, and allonyms are all phenomena engendered by language contact and colonization. If Italy can claim botanists after whom new species have been named, its marginality in the process of  hegemony  and colonization increases cultural distance and difficulty in representation. 

The topic of phytonyms in translation has been influenced by the works of Eugene Nida (componential analysis) and presented at conferences (Masiola, "Where have all the flowers gone?", Secundas Jornadas Nacionales de Historia de Traducción, Universidad de Léon, 1990). Interflora is also inspired by Jack Goody's fascinating The culture of the flowers. I

would also like to acknowledge Saulo Bianco's dissertation “La traduzione floreale” (University of Trieste, SSLMIT, 1985). At the time, translation and colonial studies were virtually non-existent.