The Routledge Handbook of Translation and Pragmatics

“The relations of signs to interpreters”

Translating readers and characters from English to Italian

Massimiliano Morini

Introduction

When it comes to the translation of literary fiction, many people still believe, or want to believe, that a perfect reproduction of an original is possible. In a perceptive (if theoretically naive) article on her experiences in and around translation, Anthea Bell quotes a neighbour who, on learning what she does for a living, commiserates with her because it “must be boring” (Bell, 2006: 62). Translation trainees, when asked what their prospective trade is or involves, provide definitions that involve “recreating” a replica of the original “as faithfully as possible” (Morini, 2013: 156–157). Comments and definitions such as these reflect linguistic notions which are still very widespread, even though they were disproved long ago in respectable academic circles (Hermans, 1985): the general idea behind them is that languages are comparable collections of words and phrases, and translation is a magic wand that turns the words and phrases of one language into those of another – a transformative spell that is deemed to be so much the more necessary when the source text is a beloved literary text.

The translators themselves, of course, know better. They know that their trade involves struggling with linguistic systems that are often incomparable, and that very little can be measured at the level of words and phrases. In a published dialogue “on a translator’s interventions”, for instance, literary translator Nicholas De Lange answers the typical objections of word-bound readers and reviewers by reminding his interlocutor that he “didn’t translate that word, a word only has meaning in a context [. . .] in a sentence, and the sentence is in a paragraph and the paragraph is in a book, so nothing is quite on its own” (Schwartz & De Lange, 2006: 11).

Even the finest practitioners, however, normally lack a language to express what it is they do in the transition from the source to the target text. De Lange, for instance, goes on to say – rather confusingly – that “what you say has got to be the same as what the original said, even if it is not expressed in exactly the same words in the same order”, and defines this deontic position as “faithfulness [that] isn’t just faithfulness to the words” (Schwartz & De Lange, 2006: 12; italics mine). Analogously, the very articulate English–Italian translator Massimo Bocchiola judges one of his versions as too “fluent and literal” (“la traduzione fila via alla lettera” Bocchiola, 2015: 157); and his colleague Susanna Basso sees her work in terms of inevitable “losses which guarantee more effort on her part in the future” (“ogni perdita [. . .] è garanzia di un maggiore impegno futuro” Basso, 2010: 20). The problem with pronouncements such as these is that the word “faithfulness”, just as the free-literal dichotomy and the idea of “loss” in the translation process, presupposes an idea of translation that is not substantially different from that of Anthea Bell’s neighbour. These translators of literary fiction know that they have to recreate the text, but still like to believe that their target version can be (at least ideally, ultimately, utopically) a perfect replica of its source.

What seems to be missing from all these comments and definitions is a pragmatic understanding of the translator’s craft – or in some cases a theoretically informed pragmatic understanding, since the translators have at least a good intuitive understanding of what is involved in their work. A good example of this is De Lange’s remark about the interconnectedness of all wordings within a text: this is essentially a pragmatic notion, in that it presupposes that words, phrases, clauses, sentences and paragraphs only mean something in their co-text, as well as in a context (i.e., that translation semantics needs to be complemented by translation pragmatics). Also, it follows from this statement that a text “does” something in its entirety – that it is, as some linguists have it, a “text act” (Hatim & Mason, 1990: 76–92; Hatim, 1998). A further logical consequence would be that if all texts do something, then a target text cannot help doing something different from its source: but De Lange, just as Basso and Bocchiola, stops short of admitting this fully and openly, because he wants to maintain a strong ideal association between original and translation.

While the following sections do not wish to suggest that this association should be severed, they propose pragmatics as a useful set of tools to understand what actually happens in the passage from source to target text.¹ If that passage is to be observed with a significant degree of scientific precision, source and target must be set on the same plane of literary value, and the latter cannot be considered as a mere reflection or refraction of the former (Lefevere, 1982). The application of pragmatics is particularly apposite to the study of (translated) fiction, because both pragmatics and fiction are interested in how human relationships are “encoded in the structure of language” (Levinson, 1983: 11; Brown & Levinson, 1987), and in the relation of what is being said with what is being intended or withheld (Grice, 1967; Sperber & Wilson, 1995). In fiction, human relationships are both portrayed (among characters) and logically presupposed by the act of writing (between writer and reader): a pragmatic study of fictional translation must therefore take into account both aspects. In what follows, the presupposed relationship between writer/translator and reader takes temporal precedence over that among fictional humans.² Implicit in all the analytic examples – all of them samples of English–Italian narrative translation – is the notion that source and target texts are comparable but separate text acts, that they “do” different things with words (Austin, 1962), each creating its own unique “fictional world” (Leech & Short, 2007: 13–20).

1 Writer–reader pragmatics: politeness and narrative

Fiction is, first and foremost, a linguistic exchange between writer and reader. A number of narratological figures and mental constructs normally feature as mediators in this act: the writer employs narrators, characters and narratees to convey the story, and the story itself can presuppose its “ideal” or “model” readers (Iser, 1978: 20–50; Eco, 1983: 50–53). Still, at a very basic level, there is no substantial difference between oral and written storytelling (Fludernik, 1996: 47), and the lack of a physical audience does not change the intrinsically communicative nature of narrative.

In theory, if fiction is a communicative act, there should be a premium on the books that tell a story in the simplest and most direct way – and it is arguable that the most popular fiction exhibits the features of simplicity and directness. However, just as in face-to-face exchanges, there are reasons why the most straightforward strategy is not invariably selected. The writer may wish to create a fictional world that presupposes difficulty or indirection, and ask the reader to go out of his/her way to decode the text. In terms of Brown and Levinson’s politeness theory, the writer may commit a face-threatening act against the reader’s negative face – i.e., the reader’s wish not to be disturbed, not to make an extra effort (Brown & Levinson, 1987: 61; Black, 2006: 74–76). This is the case with that form of modernist fiction that attempts a close depiction of characters’ mental processes, as free from narrative intervention as possible. The reader is not completely left to his/her own devices, but has to make a number of interpretive interventions which include revising his/her opinion of who is thinking/speaking at various junctures.

In many of Virginia Woolf’s novels, for instance, free indirect thought and a conversational style are used to blur the conventional divide between narrator and characters. The idea, as expressed by the author in “Mr Bennett and Mrs Brown” (1924), is that in order to give readers an unprecedented insight into the thoughts and feelings of fictional people, that traditional division must give way to techniques which mix the planes rather than separating them – and Woolf herself knew that an uncommon kind of reader was needed for this form of “intimacy” to be appreciated (Woolf, 1992: 81). A good illustration of this technique and its effects is a passage in the first chapter of To the Lighthouse (1927), in which Mrs Ramsay is expressing her wish that the weather may be fine and allow her family to go on the titular expedition:

“But it may be fine – I expect it will be fine,” said Mrs Ramsay, making some little twist of the reddish-brown stocking she was knitting, impatiently. If she finished it tonight, if they did go to the Lighthouse after all, it was to be given to the Lighthouse keeper for his little boy, who was threatened with a tuberculous hip; together with a pile of old magazines, and some tobacco, indeed whatever she could find lying about, not really wanted, but only littering the room, to give those poor fellows who must be bored to death sitting all day with nothing to do but polish the lamp and trim the wick and rake about on their scrap of garden, something to amuse them. For how would you like to be shut up for a whole month at a time, and possibly more in stormy weather, upon a rock the size of a tennis lawn? she would ask.

(Woolf, 1977: 10)

The passage does not make for easy reading, but it does create the sense that one is following the stream of Mrs Ramsay’s thoughts with little or no mediation. It opens with a brief stretch of direct speech which, in its very repetitiveness, signals the strength of the character’s wishes (“it may [. . .] I expect [. . .]”). Mrs Ramsay is hoping for good weather for her son’s sake, and therefore corrects her hope into a forecast. In terms of narrative perspective, these two clauses of direct speech also serve the purpose of signalling that everything that follows must probably be seen from Mrs Ramsay’s point of view – in a word, that Mrs Ramsay is the reflector in this passage. The following lines confirm not only that this is true, but also that much of the passage must be read as free indirect thought rather than mere narrative (“If she finished tonight, if they did go to the Lighthouse after all [. . .]”). The reason why this interpretation is plausible is that the style chosen for the passage is very conversational, which creates the impression that one is listening to the character’s random thoughts rather than the narrator’s neat arrangement of these thoughts: this is nowhere more evident than in the list of all the possible gifts for the keeper’s boys, which is very long and non-hierarchical (“a pile of old magazines, and some tobacco, indeed whatever she could find lying about [. . .]”), and ends with a specification which might have been given at the beginning had the register been more “written” (“something to amuse them”). Finally, the second stretch of direct speech in the passage is given without inverted commas (“For how would you like [. . .] tennis lawn?”), and with the verbum dicendi postponed (“she would ask”). One will have to wait a few more lines to know that this kind of thing is what Mrs Ramsay used to say to her daughters, in order to impress them with the hardships suffered by those children.

This is certainly not the most straightforward way of telling (part of) a story: the reader’s mind must store a lot of information before it can be unambiguously allocated, and has to settle on a source for feelings and thoughts that are not explicitly attributed by the narrator. On the other hand, this style certainly succeeds in creating “intimacy” between reader and character: most narrative mediation is eliminated, or at least made so unobtrusive (in terms of quantity and positioning) as to be barely noticeable. The casual quality of most clauses creates the impression of eavesdropping on a character’s mental processes, even when the temporal plane is the narrator’s (i.e., when the past tense is used). At the same time, a similar form of intimacy is also created between reader and author, precisely because the former needs to invest a lot of processing effort in order to interpret what the latter wrote.

This kind of “impolite” intimate style is the result of a conscious decision which involves a sacrifice in terms of clarity. Quite often, translators decide to soften the impact of this kind of decision – either because they are mere translators (and therefore normally considered less authoritative than their authors, and not necessarily possessed of a consistent artistic vision), or because their literary milieu is not ready for the same kind of face-threatening acts that the source writer has dared to commit. Research in the field of Corpus-based Translation Studies has shown that “explicitation” and “disambiguation” are universal tendencies in interlingual transference (Laviosa, 2002: 36); and in certain contexts, country-, language- or genre-specific “translation norms” (Toury, 1995) may also lead translators to pen more readily comprehensible versions of their source texts. This, for instance, is the version of the above passage penned by Giulia Celenza, who produced the earliest Gita al faro (An Outing to the Lighthouse; 1934) for fascist Italy:

“Ma può far bello; spero che faccia bello,” insistè la signora Ramsay, attorcigliando nervosamente il calzerotto rossiccio che stava facendo.

Se avesse terminato il paio in serata, e se fossero andati finalmente al Faro, avrebbe dato quei calzerotti al guardafaro pel suo figliolo (un piccino minacciato di tubercolosi all’anca), insieme con un fascio di vecchie riviste, un po” di tabacco, e qualunque oggetto a lei superfluo che le desse ingombro per casa e che potesse procurar diletto a quei poverini; i quali dovevano annoiarsi a morte senza avere da far altro in tutto il giorno che ripulire il fanale, pareggiarne il lucignolo e girellare in un ritaglio di giardinetto. “A chi piacerebbe esser confinati per un mese intero, e forse più in tempo di burrasche, sopra una roccia grande quanto un campo da tennis?” ella esclamava.

(Woolf & Celenza, 1991: 2–3)

[“But it may be fine – I hope it will be fine,” Mrs Ramsay insisted, nervously twisting the reddish-brown stocking she was making.

If she was able to finish the pair in the evening, and if they finally went to the Lighthouse, she would give those stockings to the keeper for his son (a little boy who was threatened with tuberculosis of the hip), together with a sheaf of old magazines, some tobacco, and whatever object superfluous for her, littering her house, that could give delectation to those poor little things; who surely must be bored to death having nothing else to do all day but polish the lamp, trim the wick and stroll around in their scrap of a garden. “Who would like to be confined for a whole month, and maybe more in stormy weather, on a rock as wide as a tennis lawn?” she would cry.]

In Geoffrey Leech’s general theory of pragmatics (1983), the main principles of human communication are subsumed under two labels, which he terms “interpersonal” and “textual pragmatics” – and which describe, respectively, how humans interact and how they structure their messages so as to be understood. Among the four subdivisions of Leech’s textual rhetoric, the “clarity principle” leads communicators to: “(a) Retain a direct and transparent relationship between semantic and phonological structure (i.e., between message and text)” (“Transparency maxim”) and “(b) Avoid ambiguity” (“Ambiguity maxim”; Leech, 1983: 66). Celenza’s passage of translated prose seems designed to illustrate the hold of these maxims on the human mind. On the one hand, by ordering everything more clearly than in the source and using punctuation more obtrusively, the Italian version clarifies the relation between message and text, or between this particular passage and the general drift of the narrative (here, it is immediately clear that Mrs Ramsay is expressing pity for the keeper’s son, and that it is she who is talking at the end). On the other hand, and on a related note, most ambiguities are successfully solved in Celenza’s lines – particularly the ambiguities of narrator/character attribution. As an ancillary result, of course, Woolf’s “intimacy” is far less in evidence.

There are many points in Celenza’s passage in which Woolf’s message is clarified and purged of ambiguity:³ at the very beginning, Mrs Ramsay’s feelings are made clearer but the use of the verb “spero” (“I hope”) as a substitute of “I expect” – which makes it evident that she is not at all convinced the weather will be fine, but hopes so for her son’s sake. In the following sentence, the list of things to be given to the keeper’s family, and of reasons why it is important to give them, is split up in one main and one relative clause (“quei poverini: i quali”/“those poor little things; who surely”), with the explanatory “something to amuse them” closing the main clause (“che potesse procurar diletto a quei poverini”/“that could give delectation to those poor little things”). As for perspicuity of attribution, the very well-ordered nature of the clauses following, rather than piling up, on one another, the introduction of inverted commas in the second instance of direct speech (“A chi [. . .] tennis?”), and the consistently high register and Tuscan literary diction (“terminato” (concluded) as opposed to “finito” (finished); “diletto” (delectation) as a noun substitute of “amuse”; “pareggiarne il lucignolo” for “trim the wick”), all make it clear that there is an external, educated and rational voice here, politely introducing Mrs Ramsay’s thoughts and feelings rather than simply plunging readers into them. In other words, Celenza’s narrator is much more obtrusive than Woolf’s, and apparently much more eager to explain and separate one stretch of narrative/thought/speech from another.

As a result, this Gita al faro is much more polite to the reader than To the Lighthouse, in that it does not ask him/her to put in as big an interpretive effort as the source text does. Of course, this also means that the reasons why Woolf had decided to threaten her reader’s negative face (i.e., his/her “basic claim to territories, personal preserves, rights to non-distraction” – in this case, the reader’s right not to be saddled with difficult interpretive tasks; Brown & Levinson, 1987: 61) may be largely lost to Italian readers of this version, who will merely be presented with a traditional depiction of a society and a group of people. And if it is tempting to think that such simplifications are now consigned to a distant prewar past, it is worth pointing out that Celenza’s clarification of Woolf is still being reprinted by one of Italy’s most important publishing houses. It appears, therefore, that certain areas of the Italian cultural system still value “negative politeness” over “intimacy”, or at the very least that a pragmatic understanding of literary works does not rank very high in the concerns of the publishing industry.

2 Character to character pragmatics: implicatures and dialogue

Another way of describing the difference between Woolf’s To the Lighthouse and Celenza’s Gita al faro is in terms of implicit/explicit communication. In the source text, a lot of information as to who is thinking and speaking is rather suggested than given – a balance that is more or less reversed in the Italian target text. Since pragmatics can also be defined as the discipline that studies the divide between saying and meaning (or between semantic meaning and pragmatic meaning; Levinson, 1983: 12), it is best equipped to explore these modifications and measure their effects.

Paul Grice’s “implicature theory” (Grice, 1967), as complemented by a number of subsequent additions and revisions (see for instance Bertuccelli Papi, 2000: 147; Levinson, 2000), has been the most successful interpretation of the explicit/implicit divide. In Grice’s description of how human communication works, “conversational implicatures” (i.e., non-explicit meanings) arise every time speakers exploit or breach one of the maxims that make for clear, totally explicit communication (quality, quantity, relation, manner). In the linguistic analysis of literary fiction, the applications of this theory have been so widespread that they have found their way into manuals and readers of stylistics (Black, 2006: 23–35; Chapman, 2016: 81–84). Within translation studies, implicatures can of course be observed in order to verify whether the source balance between explicit and implicit information is kept or modified in the target text, and to what effect.

With authors such as Jane Austen, who employ reticent narrators and describe a society in which a lot is left unsaid in conversation, there is a strong likelihood that the quantity of explicit information will increase in the target text – or that certain implicatures will be lost in the interlingual passage, not to be replaced by any explicit information.⁴ The task, for the translator as well as the reader, is that of identifying the smaller or greater breaches of Grice’s maxims (quality, quantity, relation and manner) that signal the possibility of a non-explicit meaning being intended. Or, as Stephen C. Levinson put it in a “generalized” cognitive exploration of implicature theory:

1 If the utterance is constructed using simple, brief, unmarked forms, this signals business as usual, that the described situation has all the expected, stereotypical properties;

2 If, in contrast, the utterance is constructed using marked, prolix, or unusual forms, this signals that the described situation is itself unusual or unexpected or has special properties.

(Levinson, 2000: 6)

An illustration of this is the opening chapter of Austen’s Pride and Prejudice (1813), mainly consisting of an exchange between garrulous, marriage-fixated Mrs Bennet and her quietly sarcastic husband. When Mr Bennet insists on not asking who the new tenant of Netherfield Park is, his wife takes him to task on his uncooperativeness (“Do you not want to know who has taken it?”): “You want to tell me, and I have no objection to hearing it” (Austen, 2004: 1). Mr Bennet’s words are clearly “marked” in more than one way – as becomes immediately evident if one compares them with a number of more expected replies, such as “Of course”, “Sorry, I wasn’t paying attention”, or even “No, I’m not interested”. That emphatic “You”, as well as the whole lengthy expression of his limited interest, can be interpreted as a breach of Grice’s maxim of quantity. The most likely implicature arising from this breach is that he is not really keen on hearing what she has to say, but is forced to listen because she wants him to – in terms of Brown and Levinson’s politeness theory, the “contrastive stress” on the second-person subject can be read as an “off-record” strategy for committing a face-threatening act (Brown & Levinson, 1987: 217). In this reading, Mr Bennet is irritated but does not like to voice his irritation openly.

Further on in their conversational exchange, Mr Bennet also feigns incomprehension of the matrimonial reasons for his wife’s excitement about the arrival of an eligible young man in their neighbourhood. Again, she calls his bluff by making her own thought processes explicit:

“My dear Mr Bennet,” replied his wife, “how can you be so tiresome! You must know that I’m thinking of his marrying one of them.”

“Is that his design in settling here?”

(Austen, 2004: 1)

Here, Mr Bennet tries to evade his wife’s stringent logic by saying something patently absurd – for how can Mr Bingley have decided to settle near them so that he can marry one of their daughters, given the fact that he does not know of their existence? In Gricean terms, this may be read as a breach of either the maxim of quality or that of relation, or both – but as Sperber and Wilson point out, when such a breach occurs the hearer and reader have to assume that the speaker is still somehow being relevant (Sperber & Wilson, 1995: 158). In other words, some implicated meaning must be inferred, ranging from “why do you assume that a young man of means should be interested in our daughters?” to “I’m not interested in your foolish plans”.

Of course, the interpretation of these implicatures also depends on one’s understanding of the social conventions that apply in Austen’s fictional world – having to do with the social and economic conditions of young women in a world in which money can (almost) only be inherited by men, and also with how permissible it is to openly speak of these conditions. Either because of a limited knowledge of Regency norms, or because implicatures are by their nature fleeting, some translators miss the implicatures or turn them into explicit meanings. A case in point is Fernanda Pivano’s relatively recent Italian rendition of the two passages quoted above:

– Se non puoi proprio fare a meno di dirmelo, non ho niente in contrario a sentirlo. [. . .]

– Caro Bennet, – rispose la moglie – Come sei noioso! Devi sapere che sto pensando di fargliene sposare una.

– È con l’intenzione di sposarsi che si stabilisce qui?

(Austen & Pivano, 2007: 3–4)

[“If you really cannot help telling me, I have no objection to hearing it.” [. . .]

“Dear Bennet,” his wife replied, “How tiresome you are! You must know, then, that I’m thinking of having him marry one of them.”

“Is it with the intention of marrying that he is settling here?”]

The result is that in this Italian Orgoglio e pregiudizio, these characters and their interpersonal relations change, at least as far as this passage is concerned. Mr Bennet is more openly than covertly irritated when he says that if his wife “really cannot help” informing him, then he is ready to listen: the contrastive stress has disappeared, and that “proprio” can only be read as “I am not interested, but if you really must”. After that, somewhat incongruously, the husband asks a perfectly reasonable question on Mr Bingley’s general matrimonial intentions (“Is it with the intention of marrying that he is settling here?”). Mrs Bennet herself is made to sound even more ingenuous, and ingenuously manipulative, when she says that she wants to make Mr Bingley marry one of her daughters (as opposed to the source Mrs Bennet simply expressing a hope that he will). In general, most of the emotions expressed in the target passage are simpler and more superficial than those in the source.

With regard to conversational implicatures, the reverse can also happen in translation: sometimes, when the drift of a textual passage foreshadows future developments or suggests a number of non-explicit meanings, translators may be tempted to add implicatures or to strengthen possibilities that are only weakly suggested in the source text. An example of this is provided by the Italian translation of George Eliot’s Middlemarch (1871–1872). In the source, Sir James Chettam is trying to court Dorothea Brooke by offering to lend a horse for her private amusement and exercise. Dorothea, however, will not accept the offer – ostensibly on the grounds of her lack of horsemanship, though the reader cannot help suspecting that by refusing the animal she is actually refusing the owner:

“Then that is a reason for more practice. Every lady ought to be a perfect horsewoman, that she may accompany her husband.”

“You see how widely we differ, Sir James. I have made up my mind that I ought not to be a perfect horsewoman, and so I should never correspond to your pattern of a lady.” [. . .]

“I should like to know your reasons for this cruel resolution. It is not possible that you should think horsemanship wrong.”

“It is quite possible that I should think it wrong for me.”

(Eliot, 1985: 44)

The reason why most readers would interpret this exchange as a failed courtship probably resides in how the passage activates meanings that Bertuccelli Papi (2000: 147) terms “subplicit”. These are all the meanings which may “glide into the mind of the hearer as side effects of what is said or not said, and become the most relevant information that is retained of a whole passage”. Here, what the reader knows about men and women in general, and James Chettam’s predilections in particular, creates the possibility of interpreting the whole passage as disguised courtship, even in the absence of any maxim breaches or Levinson’s “marked, prolix, or unusual forms”. The Italian translator, however, senses the presence of these subplicit meanings and turns them into implicatures:

“Ma questo è un buon motivo per fare più pratica. Ogni moglie dovrebbe essere una cavallerizza perfetta, in modo da poter accompagnare suo marito.”

“Vedete quanto siamo diversi, Sir James. Io ho deciso che non è necessario che diventi una cavallerizza perfetta, e quindi non corrisponderei mai al vostro ideale di moglie.” [. . .]

“Mi piacerebbe conoscere le ragioni di questa crudele decisione. Non è possibile che riteniate sconveniente andare a cavallo.”

“È possibilissimo che lo ritenga sconveniente per me.”

(Eliot & Sabbadini, 1983: 22)

[“But this is a good reason to practise more. Every wife should be a perfect horsewoman, that she may accompany her husband.”

“You see how different we are, Sir James. I have decided that it is not necessary for me to become a perfect horsewoman, and therefore I should never correspond to your ideal wife.” [. . .]

“I should like to know your reasons for this cruel decision. It is not possible that you should think it unseemly to ride a horse.”

“It is quite possible that I think it unseemly for me.”]

There are two significant pragmatic modifications in the target text: the first is the use of “moglie” (wife) to translate George Eliot’s “lady”, which might also have been rendered with a more neutral “signora” – having, in Italian as in English, the secondary meaning of “wife” (in expressions such as “la mia signora” [my old lady] or “saluti alla signora” [my greetings to your wife]); the second is the transformation of the generic “wrong” (the most common translation of which is “sbagliato”) into a much more specialized “sconveniente”/“unseemly”, an adjective endowed with very strong moral and sexual connotations. In both cases – Mr Chettam stating that “Every wife should be a perfect horsewoman” and asking why Dorothea finds the idea “untoward”, with Dorothea herself picking up the terms in her answers – the introduction of slightly unexpected terms (a breach in the maxim of relation) may lead the reader to infer implicated meanings having to do with matrimonial wooing.

The translator has evidently sensed the tension between the two characters, and amplified it by turning subplicit into implicated meanings – the latter, unlike the former, having an identifiable linguistic trigger if not a univocal interpretation. The substance of the passage may be more or less unaltered – Sir James is courting Dorothea, she is repulsing his advances – but the behaviour of the target characters is significantly different. In this passage, Sir Chettam is barefacedly insistent rather than ingenuously insinuating, and Miss Brooke accepts the fact – and refuses the substance – of his courtship with no apparent sense of shame. The two characters, and the interpersonal relations between them, have undergone a subtle change: the wooer risks his positive face more openly, and the object of his affections responds by committing a face-threatening act that is much closer to being on record than its source-text precedent.

Concluding remarks

No real attempts have been made in the preceding sections at explaining the pragmatic behaviour of translators: each case outlined above would have to be explored much more fully in order to formulate reasonable hypotheses. Quite apart from the impact of the single translators’ personalities and tastes (Robinson, 2011), and the general tendencies towards “explicitation” and “disambiguation” which have been more or less universally observed in the translation process (Laviosa, 2002), many other cultural factors would have to be taken into account – factors having to do with the “translation norms” (Toury, 1995) prevalent in a certain area and period, or with regard to certain genres and classes of texts. With Italian translations of “modern classics” like Austen’s, George Eliot’s and Woolf’s, for instance, a marked preference for high-register forms has been observed (Venturi, 2009): and while this does not necessarily lead to a different balance of implicit/explicit knowledge, it can change the reader’s perception of whether a character or a narrator is in charge of a given passage (as seen in Celenza’s Gita al faro).

If it cannot be used to explain the reasons why a certain kind of target text is produced, however, pragmatics does provide scholars with the analytic tools to understand what kind of text is produced, how, and the relation it entertains with its source. A pragmatic understanding of translation goes deeper than the usual readings offered by the translators themselves – which rarely, if ever, go beyond the level of morphology and syntax, even when they strain to find words to describe the “contextual” workings of the art (Schwartz & De Lange, 2006: 11). If pragmatics can be defined as the study of “the relation of signs to interpreters” (Morris, 1938: 6), pragmatics-based translation studies can successfully investigate what kind of relations are presupposed by the source and target texts, as well as the relation between the two.

Ideally, such an understanding would then benefit all the participants in the interlingual transaction – including the translators themselves, as well as translation trainers and trainees, and all the people involved in the creation and assessment of translations. When J. S. Holmes outlined the profile of the nascent discipline of Translation Studies, in a famous article of 1972, he envisaged its “descriptive” branch as being part of a very intricate tree which would comprehend “pure” and “applied” Translation Studies – the “applied” bough further subdividing into such branches as translation training, translation criticism, translation aids, and so on. Pragmatics, whether used in the classroom or in the reviewing journal, can provide a more realistic description of what happens in the translation process than any generic notion of “equivalence” or any hazy idea of “style”.⁵ This, as seen and stated above, is particularly true in the case of literary fiction. A genre that depicts and presupposes human relationships – and whose interest often depends on the ever-shifting balance between what is openly said and what is only intimated or suggested – looks like the ideal playing ground for a discipline whose main interest lies in what people do with words, at the uneasy interface between saying and meaning.

Notes

1 While the proposal is by no means unprecedented, the secondary literature on translation and pragmatics is surprisingly thin: apart from the relatively early concerted attempts contained in Hickey (1998), one finds a single general theoretical monograph (Morini, 2013), a rather practical monograph on relevance and translation (Gutt, 1992), a book on Bible translation (Hill, 2006), also very practical, and a number of individual essays successfully using speech act theory (Pedersen, 2008), implicature (Desilla, 2012, 2014), politeness theory (Hatim & Mason, 1997) or, again, relevance theory (Kovacic, 1994), to investigate single case studies or specific aspects of interlingual transfer (often in the sub-field of audiovisual translation).

2 This is the double “discourse structure” that, according to Mick Short (1996: 169), is so evidently at the heart of dramatic construction. Here, it is the “overarching level of discourse” between writer/translator and reader that takes analytical precedence.

3 These modifications are generally in keeping with Italian “norms” for the translations of classics (Venturi, 2009), and consistent in particular with the literary taste and ideological milieu of fascist Italy (Rundle, 2010).

4 In Italian translations, in particular, this may be due both to the general tendencies towards “translational politeness” observed above, and to a vision of this particular author as the harmless creator of a slightly old-fashioned “comedy of manners” (Morini, 2017).

5 The reference here is to those trainers and reviewers who use such terms unproblematically. There is, needless to say, a rather long tradition of critical reflection on these terms that has led scholars to ponder the possibility of “illocutionary” equivalence (Trosborg, 1997: 13) and to propose a “translational stylistics” (Malmkjær, 2004).