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CATERINA BRIGUGLIA 6 Comparing two polysystems: The cases of Spanish and Catalan versions of Andrea Camilleri’s Il cane di terracotta1 One of the most interesting features of studying translations is the pos- sibility of establishing profound links between the translation strategies adopted and the extra-textual issues encountered when the translations enter into the target cultures. In Translation Studies, from Even-Zohar (1990) and the Tel-Aviv School, recent suggestions tend to privilege a multidisciplinary study and defend the role of translating as part of liter- ary and cultural polysystems in which each element is linked to the other. For this reason, when discussing translation, it is undoubtedly necessary to refer to the historical circumstances experienced by a specific commu- nity, as they determine its identity and feed the expressive forms in which that community expresses itself, including its use of translations. This first observation leads to the immediate consequence of having to deal with the descriptive analysis of translations. The analysis should not be limited to scrutinizing only the outcomes, or to assessing the strategies adopted, but should also attempt to find out the reasons that motivated the choice of one strategy over another, so as to study the internal norms of translation (see Toury 1980, 1995; Hermans 1999). Yet it would be dif ficult, perhaps not even desirable, to of fer conclusions only based upon one translation; clearly this type of corpus would be too reductive. 1 At the time of conducting part of the research for this contribution, I was...