Giuseppe Natale was born and raised in Turin, Italy. He graduated cum laude from the University of Turin with a thesis on the Canadian poet Leonard Cohen. He then moved to the United States to pursue literary studies at the University of Washington, Seattle, where he received his M.A. in Italian (with a thesis on the function of light in Dante's Divine Comedy), and his Ph. D. in comparative literature (with a dissertation on poetry and translation).

Natale is a literary translator (English to Italian). His published translations include major American novels, such as Toni Morrison's Beloved, Alice Walker's The Temple of My Familiar, Thomas Pynchon's V. and Gravity's Rainbow. He's currently working on a new Italian translation of Herman Melville's Moby Dick. Natale also has a number of publications in translation theory, and is the founding editor of TransScribe: The Teaching Translation Journal. His articles on Italian literature mostly focus on translation aspects of works by Giacomo Leopardi and Cesare Pavese.

Before arriving at UNLV, Natale taught at the University of Tennessee, Knoxville, and worked as a consultant to various publishing companies, contributing his expertise in Italian literature, American literature, and the fine arts. At UNLV, where he holds an associate professor position; he is the Italian studies and classical studies undergraduate coordinator. He is also in charge of the translation graduate program. His teaching duties include: Translation Studies (theory, pedagogy, literary translation); Italian Studies (language, literature, cinema and culture), and Latin.