Shifts of cohesion in the translation process as seen in English texts and their Italian translations

The translation process necessarily entails shifts between the source text and target text, which take place at different levels. Analysing these shifts, that is the end product, it is possible to gain a better understanding of the process and to take account for the factors involved. The present paper describes shifts of cohesion and tries to detect their causes. The methodology consists in comparing coupled pairs of source and target text-segments, drawn from English texts and their Italian translations. The segments examined have been taken from different text types (the literary text, the scientific text, the pragmatic text).