When a Clue is not a Clue. A corpus-driven study of explicit vs. implicit signalling of sentence links in popular economics translation

This paper analyses the translation of a special kind of cohesive devices - intersentential connectives - in a corpus of economics articles taken from newspapers and magazines and translated from English into Italian. Our research relates data on the frequency of connectives to data from a comparable corpus of original Italian articles and focuses on explicitation in translation achieved by inserting connectives where there were none in the source texts. We suggest that explicitation is a consequence of the translators' attempts to follow text production norms which are typical of Italian but can also be regarded as a clue to the process of decoding the - often specialist - source text information.