Say what you mean, mean what you say: a pragmatic analysis of the Italian translations of Emma

My aim in this article is to show the usefulness of pragmatics for translation analysis and, tentatively, translation training. The tools and methods developed by pragmatics in the past four decades are particularly useful for the analysis of dialogue and, more generally, face-to-face interaction. Therefore, a source text is chosen which displays a rich and intricate web of personal and social relations, and whose dialogues strike a delicate balance between what is spoken and unspoken, said and implied. Jane Austen’s Emma is compared with three Italian target texts in order to verify if that web and that balance are kept, erased, or altered in translation: the results are, perhaps not surprisingly, mixed, and demonstrate that a knowledge of the pragmatics of face-to-face interaction can be of great advantage to the translator of Emma.