To connect or not to connect: Game-theory approaches and translators' decisions in specialist translation. A corpus-based study

A commonly held assumption about English and Italian observed from a contrastive perspective is that, in written texts, Italian tends to make more extensive use of connectives and other text-organizing elements aimed at guiding the attention of readers. In a translator training context, using such elements to make coherence relations more explicit in Italian target texts is often presented as a means of rendering them more adherent to Italian conventions of text production. Little empirical support exists for such claims 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 the case of 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. This may be seen as the result of both ‘asymmetric information’ (i.e. imperfect knowledge of a domain on the part of the translator) and ‘adverse selection’ (i.e. the translator selecting the wrong kind of target-language item, or the one associated with a higher risk of misinterpretation). The paper explores the use of 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 how the frequency of connectives is, overall, higher in the nontranslated than in the translated texts. As far as translated texts are concerned, the analysis considers two particular connectives (infatti, ‘indeed, and invece, ‘instead’) and shows how translators tend to use them to make coherence relations in the translations more explicit than they are in the source texts. The results are interpreted with reference to two distinct but related phenomena: on the one hand, the hypothesized universal tendency of translators to make translations more explicit; on the other, the fact that, in following this tendency towards explicitation, Italian translators favour norms of text production that can be said to be characteristic of the target language. Reference is also made to the possibility of considering such cases of explicitation as steps in a decision-making process where translators are seen to weigh adherence to target-language conventions against the risk of misinterpreting the source text.