c) From orality to the sign

Another field in which linguistic assimilation - and hence the degree of permeability of a language to the translation process - occurs is the ‘memory of sound’, or that complicated process leading from the spoken to the written tongue. French is an oral language where the elisions of accents, avoidance of homeoteleutons, attention to the hiatus and pauses prevail: strategies necessary for its understanding. English even has a historical opening between the rules of the written language – Anglo-Saxon, Celtic and Latin – and its expression in the customs of speech, which are those belonging to the Anglo-Saxon dialects, unsuitable for expressing the written sign in all its complexity. In Italian this problem does not exist. American English has the same characteristics as Latin: the spoken tongue has increasingly less to do with the literary language, which is imported and increasingly felt as ‘extraneous’. Spanish more than any other modern language maintains the conventions with which the Humanists rendered the pronunciation and declamation of Latin; this resulted in a ‘noble’ connotation against which the last generation of writers declared war.