Thesis (M.A.)--York University, 2006. Graduate Programme in Geography. / Typescript. Includes bibliographical references (leaves 169-176). Also available on the Internet. MODE OF ACCESS via web browser by entering the following URL: http://gateway.proquest.com/openurl?url_ver=Z39.88-2004&res_dat=xri:pqdiss&rft_val_fmt=info:ofi/fmt:kev:mtx:dissertation&rft_dat=xri:pqdiss:MR29604

Understanding the lives of Italian women who migrated to Canada and Australia in the post-war period is the goal of this thesis. Although governments assigned women secondary roles as dependants and 'followers' in the migration process, I argue that Italian women were central, not marginal, to the migration and settlement experiences of Italian immigrants. By placing Italian women front and centre of this study, I contribute to a small but growing body of work that challenges the male-centred perspective of most literature on Italian-Canadian and Italian-Australian migration and ethnicity. / This thesis is structured within a feminist framework and uses interdisciplinary methods to gather and interpret quantitative and qualitative information about the lives of Italian immigrant women in post-war Canada and Australia. Using government and church archives, personal interviews, ethnic newspapers, legal documents, marriage registers and participant observer fieldwork, I explore three major themes. / Firstly, I examine Italian immigrant women's understanding of power relations within their homes and workplaces. Rather than cast women as either passive victims or all-conquering heroines, I present the complexity of the sources of power and weakness in immigrant women's lives. I argue that Italian immigrant women had to cope with exploitation and disadvantage because of their class, gender and ethnic status. However, they responded to these challenges with resistance and resilience, and were able to affect change and wield power within certain constraints. / Secondly, I compare the experiences of migration and settlement for Italian immigrant women in Canada and Australia and show how women's experiences were united by common gender concerns. I found overwhelming similarities between the family lives and work experiences of Italian-Canadian and Italian-Australian immigrant women, and in the government policies and programs that attempted to direct their migration and settlement in the post-war period. / Finally, I examine how Italian immigrant women helped to construct what it means to be 'Italian' in post-war Canada and Australia. I show how gender roles assigned to, and chosen by, Italian-Canadian and Italian-Australian women, served as boundary markers for ethnic difference. Perceived differences in attitudes towards waged work, mothering, family responsibilities and sexuality were used by Italian immigrant women to distinguish themselves as members of an ethnic collective.

The approach to translating multilingual texts has long been a subject of debate among scholars and translators, sparking discussions on which translational choices and strategies should be employed. An additional challenge occurs when a minority language in a multilingual (or rather, heterolingual) text becomes the target language. In these circumstances, the translator faces the dilemma of choosing how to preserve the Otherness that the non-dominant language conveys in the first text without overly manipulating it or stripping it of its nature. My analysis focuses on the challenges of translating Black Madonna (1982), a novel by prolific Italian-Canadian writer Frank Paci. Like many Italian-Canadian authors, the vast majority of Paci’s novels feature untranslated Italian terms and dialogues throughout the text. The first chapter of this thesis provides an introduction to the author and the basic concepts around which I structure my discourse, such as immigrant writing and the so-called ‘linguistic stones’ (untranslated terms). The section that follows features an overview of the most prominent Italian-Canadian plurilingual writers, as well as a brief analysis of a few selected works with a special focus on Scarpe Italiane (2007), the only novel by Paci to ever be translated into Italian. The research moves on to theories of translation, discussing various strategies and solutions proposed by scholars involved in the debate. The following chapter consists of a commentary in which I support a balance of foreignization and domestication by converting Italian terms into the appropriate regional dialect, since dialect is a prominent element in Paci’s novels. Finally, in the last section, I provide my translation of the novel into Italian.

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A large part of Canadian literature being produced today is being done by immigrants and the children of immigrants. Struggling between the dominant culture and the history and traditions of their parents, whom they desire to honor, these writers adopt modes of representation ranging from the elegiac to the ironic. / Nino Ricci's first book Lives of the Saints begins from the perspective of Vittorio as an adult, but the narrative that the reader follows is developed from his perspective as a child focusing on his ethnic roots. The narrative structure is two-fold: it is a combination of the objectivity of a child's innocent observations with a child's sense of wonder and magic and a strong influence from the adult narrator's voice. / This thesis will examine the narrative approach, the rhetorical devices and the use of myth that Ricci harnesses in his novel in order to show how his work is marked with ambiguity and paradox which points to the psychological condition of immigrants in Canada. The discussion will also focus on some of the literary models that influenced Ricci's narrative, such as Alice Munro, Carlo Levi and Corrado Alvaro.

The aim of this research paper is to analyse the literary works and the writers of Italian origin who have actively contributed to the creation of Italian-Canadian immigration literature, and above all, that referent to the Montreal milieu. For this and other reasons, it distinguishes itself from other Italian-Canadian productions and precisely due to this reality, the objective of this research is to: (1) examine its role, its characteristics, the difficulties its writers experience, its literary artistic value and the recognition it receives in our literary environment; (2) compare the creative approach adopted by some writers to the perfect example, Primo Levi; (3) expose its contents and reoccurring themes; (4) examine the question of the literary language of expression of these works; (5) demonstrate the social usefulness of this literary production.

A two-way bond between translation and migration has appeared in the most recent texts in the social sciences and humanities: this connection between the two is exemplified by the mobility metaphor, which considers both practices as journeys across cultural, linguistic and geographical borders. Among the different ways this mobility metaphor can be studied, two particular areas of investigation are of interest for this research: firstly, migrant writing, a literary genre shaped from the increasing migratory movements worldwide; the second area of interest is literary translation, the activity that shapes the way these narratives are disseminated beyond the linguistic borders they were produced in. My investigation into the role of literary translation in the construction and circulation of a migrant discourse starts with the claim that writing and translation in itinerant contexts are driven by, and participate in, the idea of the journey: an interlingual and intercultural flow regulated by social/economic/artistic constraints, a movement in which the migrant experience is ‘translated’ in writing and then ‘migrated’ across languages and spaces. The present analysis focuses on the representative case study of migrant narratives by Canadian writers of Italian descent: their shared reflections on the themes of nostalgia and the mythical search for roots, together with a set of specific linguistic devices – hybridity, juxtaposition of languages, idiolects and registers – create a distinctive literary migrant discourse, that of the return to the land of origin. Guided primarily by the theoretical framework of Cultural Studies, the first part of this work seeks to illustrate how thematic and linguistic elements contribute to the construction of a homecoming discourse in original migrant narratives, and how this relates to the translation practice. Subsequently, the analysis moves to the examination of how these motives are reproduced in the translated texts, and what is/are the key rationale/s behind the translation of this type of works. Ultimately, my research takes a sociologically informed interest in the influence of translation and its agents in endorsing and/or manipulating this rationale in the receiving culture. In fact, this research aims to represent equally the human and cultural-linguistic aspects that affect these translational journeys, concentrating, firstly, on the actors (authors and literary translators) and the social and artistic environments that surround the production of both the source and target texts and, subsequently, on the texts themselves.

This thesis constitutes a first large-scale study of literary self-translators and self-translations in Canada, with self-translation understood as interlinguistic and intertextual transfer where the same legal person is responsible for writing the antecedent and subsequent texts. Three main questions guide this investigation: To what extent is Canada fertile ground for self-translation? What does it mean to self-translate in Canada? Why does self-translation in Canada matter? After situating Canada-based research within broader self-translation scholarship, I engage in a critical analysis of the definition and implications of self-translation and contextualize the theoretical, sociopolitical and methodological rationale for studying Canada and adopting a macroscopic approach to examining self-translations and their writers in this country. The thesis predominantly revolves around self-translation artefacts produced by three groups of writers who self-translated in Canada at least once between 1971 and 2016: 1) those self-translating exclusively between English and French; and those self-translating into and/or out of 2) Spanish; or 3) standard Italian. Exploring the theme of collaboration, I propose a new typology of collaborative self-translation, attempting to account for both process- and product-related considerations. In examining the theme of frequency, I identify self-translators and discuss their relative distribution vis-à-vis language, generation, country of birth and location within Canada; I also map out a conceptual framework for defining and counting self-translation products, proposing new ways of understanding and classifying writers in light of their self-translational productivity. In considering the theme of language, I analyze how writers and their self-translations can be characterized in relation to language variety, language combinations and language directionality. In this thesis, I argue that Canada is a significant hub of heterogeneous self-translational activity, and that large-scale, quantitative and product-oriented study constitutes a useful research approach that can generate rich findings and complement other forms of investigation. The thesis also contains an extensive appendix in which I identify Canadian self-translators and their self-translations.

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