A Study in Scarlet: a comparative analysis of three Italian translations of the first Sherlock Holmes novel

There is plenty of literature on the broad notion of translation, as well as on the one of literary translation. A field that needs/should receive more attention is a specific branch of translation, i. e., retranslation. This dissertation will explore the concept of retranslation, alongside other key concepts of major importance, such as the concepts of domestication and foreignization, firstly introduced by Lawrence Venuti in his book The Translator's Invisibility: A History of Translation (1995), and the Retranslation Hypothesis, postulated by Antoine Berman and Paul Bensimon in 1990, just to name a few. In order to provide an example on how previous translations have influenced the following ones, we will analyse three different Italian versions of the first Sherlock Holmes novel, A Study in Scarlet, by Arthur Conan Doyle. We will highlight the differences between the three of them and compare them to the original version, aiming to identify which translation strategies have been used by the translators and explain the reasons behind the decision to retranslate a literary work. Finally, with the aid of specific criteria, we will evaluate the quality of the three retranslations.