Traducir la comparación: entre locuciones y colocaciones léxicas complejas en italiano y en español

This article examines, from an Italian–Spanish contrastive perspective, the translation of stereotyped comparative phraseological units, i.e. constructions such as It. dormire come un ghiro, Sp. dormir como un lirón, or It. essere come cane e gatto, Sp. ser/estar como el perro y el gato, which convey a unitary semantic value through syntactic structures crystallised by repeated usage and sanctioned by the phraseological norms of the respective languages. Building on the theoretical distinction between phrasemes and complex lexical collocations, several typologies of these two phraseological categories are presented, and the degree of interlinguistic equivalence exhibited by these units in Italian and Spanish through a systematic comparison of monolingual and bilingual lexicographic sources and contemporary usage corpora. The analysis shows that, alongside a minority of cases displaying total formal and lexical coincidence, cases of partial coincidence—characterised by semantic and structural correspondence without lexical coincidence in the comparative term—or complete non-coincidence clearly predominate. These findings highlight the need for translators and foreign-language teachers to pay systematic attention to strategies of semantic compensation, to the prior paraphrastic explication of phraseological meaning, and to the systematic consultation of authentic usage corpora, rather than relying on literal or calque-based translation