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Sample translations submitted: 1
English to Italian: http://ricerca.repubblica.it/repubblica/archivio/repubblica/2015/02/14/la-lezione-delle-crociate-per-capire-gli-orrori-dellis12.html?ref=search General field: Other Detailed field: Journalism
Source text - English history simplifies,” wrote the great baseball analyst Bill James, thirty years ago. “But you never know in which way.” He was writing, as it happens, about the career of Dave Parker, the great Pittsburgh Pirates outfielder who seemed a lock for the Hall of Fame until the cocaine scandals of the early eighties got him by the throat, or, rather, by the nose. Would history recall the drugs and keep him at a distance, or would it forget them and see only his sterling record? The Hall of Fame hasn’t opened to him yet. But James’s rule is true of bigger histories, too: history does simplify—the trick, a hard one, is that restoring complexity doesn’t always make things clearer.
This reflection is set off by something the President said recently, at the National Prayer Breakfast, apropos the horrors of ISIS’s murder of helpless captives. His comment was seemingly obvious and unobjectionable: that almost every religion (perhaps excepting certain strains of Buddhism, Jainism, or the like) has been implicated in horrors throughout its history, including his own Christian faith. “During the Crusades and the Inquisition, people committed terrible deeds in the name of Christ,” he said, stating a truth that one would think only the half crazy could dispute.
Well, half crazy is not so hard to find in America, and Obama’s statement became a source of outrage among the predictable parties, with a lot of frantic Googling to find evidence that our record, though it may look bad, is nowhere near as bad as theirs. The Crusades were not that simple. They were reprisals for Muslim invasions. (This is the “Ma, he started it!” school of moral inquiry.) They weren’t even called the Crusades! (But then the Holocaust was never called the Holocaust while it was happening.) The Inquisition? Well, the Inquisition didn’t actually burn people alive; it told the state authorities that the heretics were hopeless, and they did the burning. (So that’s all right, then, said all the heretics burned alive.) And, anyway, everybody burned and massacred everybody back then.
This leads, in turn, to a fixed line of apologetics, which the ideologically minded for some reason think particularly profound: it wasn’t the faith itself, just some misfits among the faithful, who did the killing. That the terrorists in Paris cried out “The Prophet is avenged!” doesn’t implicate their religion anymore than that the Catholic Church’s participation in those autos-da-fé implicates the Church.
History does simplify, and even horrors have micro-histories of their own. This accounts, perhaps, for a primitive but common confusion between the forces that make history and the facts that history makes happen. The forces in history are always multiple, complex, and contingent, much more so than the fables make it seem. The forces in any particular historical event are always almost infinitely divisible into smaller and often contradictory parts, with a lot of fuzzy cases and leg room. The Crusades were a lot more complicated than an assault of murderous Christians on innocent Saracens. But the basic facts remain the same: huge numbers of helpless people, from Jews in Central Europe to Byzantine Greeks in Constantinople, got raped and tortured and murdered in the name of faith. You don’t have to be Jewish to enjoy Levy’s rye bread, the old ad used to say, and you don’t have to be Jewish to deplore the massacre at Worms.
The Crusades were not an assault of evil Christians on innocent Muslims anymore than the Turks who took Byzantium were horrible savages engaged in a war with classical humanism. But what happened happened. We welcome complexity because it makes the moral points stand out more clearly against their background, just as we welcome linear perspective in paintings because it makes the acts of the foreground figures more fully articulate. We can understand the long pasts that make bad things happen and still put the blame on the bad people who did them. Ideologies are abstract; the acts they inspire are real.
You can immunize any ideology, no matter how vile, if you insist that no one is responsible for what it actually creates. You can give any doctrine in history tenure if you insist that it’s responsible only for the good things that came of it and ascribe the rest to misunderstandings and mistakes. There are people who will say that Stalinists or the Khmer Rouge, not Marxists, staffed the Gulag or the killing fields; that rogue elements of the American army, not Americans, massacred the Vietnamese at My Lai; and so on. But no doctrine or national ideal exists pristinely, outside the practices of its believers. (Nazi apologetics has trafficked in exactly the same apologias—the Bolsheviks started it—but on the whole the memory of Nazi horrors is sufficient to get this line of argument shut down.)
The job of the good historian is to balance understanding with indictment; it’s the polemicist who tries to use history only to plead innocent. The acts of the Crusades, like the facts of slavery, happened. Fanatics acting in the name of a faith murdered thousands of helpless people. That nobody else did better in the period of the Crusades is not the point; it is exactly the problem. It’s why we feel now that all the fanaticisms and ideologies at large in the period were equally horrible, and why we thank our stars, and our enlightened forefathers and foremothers, that we have (mostly) escaped from them.
Bad acts may rise from good causes: faith may never be the enemy; fanaticism is always the enemy. But faith has always been the first seedbed of fanaticism. That’s why, when people commit acts of horrible cruelty for political purposes, we say that they’ve made a “religion” out of their politics, or have succumbed to a mad ideological dogma. Fanaticism is the belief that a single faith or ideology contains all the truth of the world, and that others should at best be tolerated. Liberalism is the belief that toleration is not enough, that an active, affirmative pluralism is essential to social sanity. Pluralism is the essence of liberalism—including the possibility of self-reproach for things that liberalism has done badly. America is not responsible for My Lai only to the degree that America renounces the self-righteous “exceptionalism” that put those murders in motion and then prevented those who caused them from being blamed. Excessive scruples—liberal guilt—are as sure a sign of sanity as excessive sanctimony is a sign of the opposite.
It became clear, as the week went past, that one needn’t go so far back to find ISIS-style deeds committed by Jesus-styled people. (Ta-Nehisi Coates and Jamelle Bouie have pointed out that horrors precisely congruent to those carried out by ISIS were pursued by lynch mobs in the American South with implicit evangelical approval, and at times active endorsement, in our own recent history.) The President’s point turned out to be not just exactly right but profoundly right: no group holds the historical moral high ground, and no one ever will. But this is not because a moral high ground doesn’t exist. It’s because we’re all still climbing
Translation - Italian Obama e i crociati
Di Adam Gopnik
“La storia semplifica tutto”, scrisse 30 anni fa il grande esperto di baseball Bill James. “Ma non sai mai in che modo.” All’epoca, stava scrivendo la biografia di Dave Parker, il grande “esterno” dei Pittsburgh Pirates che sembrava destinato alla Hall of Fame, fin quando degli scandali per problemi di cocaina lo hanno preso per la gola, anzi, per il naso, agli inizi degli anni 80. La storia lo obnubilerà ricordando i suoi trascorsi di droga, o dimenticherà gli scandali in nome dei suoi autentici record? La Hall of Fame non gli ha ancora aperto le porte. Ma l’aforisma di James vale anche per storie più importanti: è vero che la storia semplifica tutto – e la trappola, insidiosa, è che ripristinare la complessità non sempre rende le cose più chiare.
Faccio questa riflessione dopo una recente dichiarazione del Presidente Obama, in occasione della National Prayer Breakfast, in merito alle orrende uccisioni di prigionieri inermi da parte dell’Isis. Il suo commento era apparentemente ovvio e inconfutabile: che nella loro storia, quasi tutte le religioni (a parte forse alcune forme di Buddismo, Giainismo e simili), compresa la sua religione cristiana, siano state la concausa di orrendità. “Ai tempi delle Crociate e dell’Inquisizione, si commettevano atti terribili in nome di Cristo,” ha osservato, dicendo una verità che solo un seminfermo di mente metterebbe in discussione.
Ebbene, i seminfermi non sono rari in America, e l’affermazione di Obama ha scatenato l’ovvio risentimento di certi partiti, con ricerche frenetiche su Google di prove che i nostri trascorsi, sebbene possano sembrare oscuri, non lo sono mai stati quanto i loro. Le Crociate non erano così semplici. Erano rappresaglie contro le invasioni musulmane. (E’ la scuola di ricerca morale “Ma ha iniziato lui”.) Non le chiamavano neanche Crociate! (Ma neanche l’Olocausto veniva definito così quando succedeva). L’Inquisizione? In realtà, non bruciava le persone vive; diceva alle autorità statali che gli eretici erano irrecuperabili e ed erano queste ultime a metterli al rogo. (va bene, dicevano gli eretici arsi vivi.) E comunque, tutti poi reagivano massacrando e bruciando tutti.
A sua volta, ciò conduce a una serie fissa di giustificazioni: che gli ideologizzati, chissà perchè, ritengono particolarmente profonde: a uccidere, non era la fede in sé, ma solo dei fanatici religiosi; che il grido dei terroristi di Parigi “Il Profeta è vendicato!” non riguarda la loro religione più di quanto la partecipazione della Chiesa cattolica in quegli auto-da-fè non riguardi la Chiesa.
La storia semplifica certamente, e persino gli orrori hanno una propria micro-storia. Questo spiega, forse, la confusione primitiva ma comune tra le forze che producono la storia e i fatti che la storia fa accadere. Le forze della storia sono sempre molteplici e complesse e contingenti, più di quanto le bugie non le facciano sembrare. Le forze che producono qualunque particolare evento storico sono sempre infinitamente divisibili in parti più piccole e contraddittorie con molte ambiguità e molti spazi di mobilità. Le Crociate erano molto più complicate che un attacco a saraceni innocenti da parte di cristiani sanguinari. Ma i fatti di base rimangono gli stessi: un grande numero di persone inermi, dagli ebrei dell’Europa centrale ai greci- bizantini di Costantinopoli, furono torturati e uccisi in nome della religione. Non occorre essere ebrei per apprezzare il pane di segale di Levy, diceva la vecchia pubblicità, e non c’è bisogno di essere ebrei per deplorare il massacro di Worms.
The Crusades were not an assault of evil Christians on innocent Muslims anymore than the Turks who took Byzantium were horrible savages engaged in a war with classical humanism. But what happened happened. We welcome complexity because it makes the moral points stand out more clearly against their background, just as we welcome linear perspective in paintings because it makes the acts of the foreground figures more fully articulate. We can understand the long pasts that make bad things happen and still put the blame on the bad people who did them. Ideologies are abstract; the acts they inspire are real.
Le Crociate non furono l’assalto dei Cristiani cattivi ai musulmani innocenti più di quanto i turchi che presero Bisanzio furono degli orribili selvaggi in guerra contro l’umanismo classico. Ma quello ch è successo è successo. Accogliamo la complessità perchè fa risaltare le questioni morali più chiaramente sullo sfondo, così come apprezziamo la prospettiva lineare dei dipinti perché articola meglio le azioni dei personaggi in primo piano. Comprendiamo le lunghe epoche passate che fanno accadere i misfatti, ma incolpiamo i loro cattivi fautori. Le ideologie sono astratte, ma gli atti che producono sono reali.
Potete neutralizzare qualunque ideologia, quantunque vile, insistendo a dire che nessuno è responsabile di quello che realmente fa. Potete riabilitare qualunque dottrina nella storia, continuando a dire che è responsabile solo delle sue conseguenze positive e attribuendo il resto a equivoci ed errori. Alcuni diranno che furono gli stalinisti o i Khmer rossi, e non i marxisti, a gestire i Gulag o i campi di steminio; che furono solo dei delinquenti dell’esercito americano, e non gli americani, a massacrare i vietnamiti a My Lai; e così via. Ma non esiste alcuna dottrina o ideale pura, slegata dalle pratiche dei suoi sostenitori. (Le giustificazioni dei nazisti hanno spacciato esattamente le stesse argomentazioni- hanno cominciato i bolscevichi – ma nel complesso, per smontarle, è sufficiente la memoria degli orrori nazisti)
Il lavoro dei buoni storici è di bilanciare la comprensione e l’accusa; è il polemista che cerca di usare la storia solo per giurare la sua innocenza. Gli misatti delle Crociate, come quelli della schiavitù, sono successi. I fanatici che agiscono in nome della religione hanno assassinato migliaia di persone inermi. Il punto non è che nessun altro sia stato migliore; è proprio il problema. E’ il motivo per cui ora sentiamo che tutti i fanatismi e le ideologie predominanti in quel periodo erano altrettanto orribili, e per cui ringraziamo le nostre stelle, oltre ai nostri antenati illuminati, per averli (in gran parte) scampati.
Il male può nascere dal bene: la religione non può mai essere il nemico; il fanatismo lo è sempre. Ma la religione è sempre stata il terreno fertile del fanatismo. Per questo, quando gli uomini commettono atti di orribile crudeltà, diciamo che hanno fatto una religione della loro politica, o che sono prigionieri di un folle dogma ideologico. Il fanatismo è la convinzione che un’unica religione o ideologia contenga tutta la verità del mondo, e che le altre religioni debbano essere, al massimo, tollerate. Il liberalismo è la credenza che la tolleranza non sia sufficiente, che un pluralismo attivo e assertivo sia fondamentale per una società sana. Il pluralismo è l’essenza del liberalismo – compresa la possibilità di rimproverarsi per gli errori del liberalismo. L’America non è responsabile per i fatti di My Lai solo relativamente alla sua rinuncia all”eccezionalismo” presuntuoso che ha causato quegli omicidi e impedito che fossero incolpati i responsabili. Gli scrupoli eccdessivi – la colpa liberale – sono sicuramente un indizio di ragionevolezza quanto l’eccessiva santimonia un segno del contrario.
La settimana dopo, è stato subito chiaro che non occorre di andare così indietro nel tempo per vedere uomini travestiti da cristiani commettere atti in stile Isis. (Ta-Nehisi Coates e Jamelle Bouie hanno evidenziato come, nella storia recente sudamericana, orrori esattamente sovrapponibili a quelli dell’Isis siano stati commessi da linciatori con l’implicita approvazione, e talvolta con l’appoggio attivo, della chiesa locale). L’argomentazione del Presidente Obama non si è rivelata solo esattamente, ma anche profondamente, corretta: nessun gruppo può, né mai potrà, assurgere a storico paladino morale. Ma non perchè non esista una vetta morale, ma perché ci stiamo ancora arrampicando.
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Years of experience: 29. Registered at ProZ.com: May 2013.
English to Italian (Scuola Superiore per Interpreti e Traduttori, verified) Italian to English (Scuola Superiore per Interpreti e Traduttori, verified) German to Italian (Scuola Superiore per Interpreti e Traduttori, verified) Italian to German (Scuola Superiore per Interpreti e Traduttori, verified)
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- Translator/reviewer/editor of Italian English, German, French (all) language combinations e.g. for:
- The Corriere della Sera - RCS Mediagroup leading national daily paper (subject field: economics,
finance, political economy, sport, society, topicality - see links in the below-mentioned “translation
sample” section);
- La Repubblica (subject field: economics, finance, political economy, society, topicality)
- Università Cattolica del Sacro Cuore, Language Center (about: marketing, communication, media,
business);
- Edizioni Minerva Medica S.p.A; “Gynecological Surgery,” (international scientific gynecology
magazine);S. Giuseppe Hospital (medical instrument-related clinical trials);
- VNU Business Publications (international ICT magazines)
- Armenia Publishing Group; Vallardi (books about various topics);
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- Teacher and contract professor of English and German (in particular specific domain) languages,
translation and interpreting (from/into Italian English and German) at the:
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Mediators);
- Università IULM of Milan, Faculty of Interpreting, Translation, Linguistic and Cultural Studies -
Graduate course in Interpretation and Communication;
- Università Statale degli Studi of Milan, - (Postgraduate) Specialization School in General Medicine
and Surgery; - Physical Education and Sport Science; - Faculty of Political science - Foreign
Languages Dpt;
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- Publich higher secondary schools – (1st and 2nd degree, Milan)
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communication, information/telecommunication technology, science, culture and society (for general
national and subject field media like: Corriere della Sera, Il Mondo, Sole24ore, Milano Finanza, Italia
Oggi, Il Giorno, La Nazione, Il Resto del Carlino, Pubblicità Italia, ZeroUno).
- Publisher of English Channel a webtv for the learning of English domain specific languages (like:
economics, information and telecommunicationtechnologies, marketing/communication, culture and
society, entertainment, science), with interviews, reportages, debates, conferences, documentaries,
(web)seminars and video/animated tutorials about a.m. topics subtitled in English and Italian,
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