Following Norms, Taking Risks: A Study of the Use of Connectives in a Corpus of Translated Economics Articles in Italian

From a contrastive perspective, Italian is often said to make more extensive use of connectives and other text-organizing elements than English. Little empirical support exists for such a claim and vague references are made in the literature to possible differences in the way text-organizing elements are used in Italian translated and non-translated texts. In specialist translation, adding text-organizing elements to a translated text may entail the risk of making explicit the wrong kind of coherence relation between two source-text sections (e.g. two juxtaposed sentences). Our paper explores the use of intersentential connectives in a corpus of Italian translated texts in economics, comparing these both with the English source texts and with comparable Italian non-translated texts. The analysis shows that the frequency of connectives is, overall, higher in the non-translated than in the translated texts; in the translated texts, a connective is often ‘added’ to the text, i.e. it has no ST counterpart; many ‘added’ connectives in the translations are items that are very frequent in non-translated texts. We take these fi ndings as evidence of two related phenomena: 1) the tendency of translators to make the TTs more explicit in terms of intersentential relations; 2) the fact that, in following this tendency towards explicitation, translators are also favouring norms of text production assumed to be characteristic of the TL. Our interpretation of these phenomena is that translators follow an initial norm inspired by ‘acceptability’ (as discussed in Gideon Toury’s theory of translation norms) and that the addition of a connective in Italian TTs is for the most part a stylistic device aimed at making the texts more idiomatic.