Panglossia Club
This week at Panglossia Club, our MFL linguists were treated to an inspirational talk on Comparative analysis of Spanish and Italian texts by Matteo M., a Lower Sixth student of Spanish.
Over the last month Matteo M. has read two books of short stories by a range of Spanish and Italian writers, but for the purpose of his talk he selected four: Alberto Moravia, Italo Svevo, Jorge Luis Borges and Don Juan Manuel. The books are essentially parallel texts with the English translation to assist young linguists overcome linguistic barriers.
Matteo compared and contrasted by main themes, styles of writing and cultural references, for which he had to undertake further research in order to fully appreciate the stories. He went on talking about the similarities of sentence structures in both languages and on how transferable language skills are. As a semi-native Italian speaker, Matteo found the Italian lexis easier to grasp, but on the grammatical level, his formal studies of Spanish grammar aided him to navigate around the grammatical nuances. In Overtaking (Italian) and The Shape of the Sword (Spanish), Matteo was struck by the psychology of the main characters, which reflected the national trait of the respective country. By contrast, in The Mother and About What Happened to a Young Man Who Married a Very Wild, Unruly Wife, Matteo focused on the theme of family rapport and how it leads to learning a lesson for life.
A huge thank you to Matteo for his insights into reading parallel texts. He is now keen to delve into Alberto Moravia鈥檚 short stories over the summer holidays.
