Cover not available

Article published In: Translation and Interpreting Studies
Vol. 16:1 (2021) ► pp.80–100

Get fulltext from our e-platform
JBE logo with link
PDF logo with download linkDownload PDF
authorization required

Translating discourse markers in theater

David Mence’s Convincing Ground in Italian translation

ORCiD logo with link | Monash University
 | University of Szeged
Published online: 2 October 2019
DOI logo with link
https://doi.org/10.1075/tis.18030.tar
Abstract
This article examines the translation of discourse markers in drama dialogue. Discourse markers are an important feature of spoken language, and unsurprisingly, they abound in drama dialogue. Yet very few studies have addressed the issue of discourse markers in theater translation. While some scholars suggest that discourse markers do not add anything to the propositional content of the sentence (. 1994. Le facce del parlare: Un approccio pragmatico all’italiano parlato. Scandicci, Firenze: La Nuova Italia.Google Scholar logo with link to Google Scholar), our study reveals that it is very difficult to omit them in translation. In this article we suggest that an approach based on pragmatics could inform the practice of translating discourse markers in a playtext without overriding the importance of the rhythm of a spoken utterance, which is vital for rendering a play in translation (Bartlett, Neil. 1996. “A different night out in the theatre. In conversation with David Johnston.” In Stages of Translation, ed. by David Johnston, 67–74. Bath: Absolute Press.Google Scholar logo with link to Google Scholar).
Article outline
  • Introduction
  • Drama dialogue and discourse markers
  • Theoretical framework
  • David Mence’s Convincing Ground
  • Translating interactional DMs in David Mence’s Convincing Ground
    • DMs on the part of the speaker
    • Request for agreement and/or confirmation
    • DMs on the part of the hearer
  • Conclusion
  • Acknowledgements
  • Notes
  • References
References (59)
References
Ariel, Mira. 1994. “Pragmatic operators.” In The Encyclopedia of Language and Linguistics, ed. by R. E. Asher and J. M. Y. Simpson, 3250–3253. Oxford: Pergamon Press.Google Scholar logo with link to Google Scholar
Arthur, Jay Mary. 1996. Aboriginal English: A Cultural Study. Melbourne: Oxford University Press.Google Scholar logo with link to Google Scholar
Bartlett, Neil. 1996. “A different night out in the theatre. In conversation with David Johnston.” In Stages of Translation, ed. by David Johnston, 67–74. Bath: Absolute Press.Google Scholar logo with link to Google Scholar
Bazzanella, Carla. 1990. “Phatic connectives as interactional cues in contemporary spoken Italian.” Journal of Pragmatics 14 (4): 629–647. Google Scholar logo with link to Google Scholar
. 1994. Le facce del parlare: Un approccio pragmatico all’italiano parlato. Scandicci, Firenze: La Nuova Italia.Google Scholar logo with link to Google Scholar
. 1995. “I segnali discorsivi.” In Grande grammatica di consultazione, ed. by Lorenzo Renzi, Giampaolo Salvi, and Anna Cardinaletti, 226–257. Bologna: Il Mulino.Google Scholar logo with link to Google Scholar
. 2001a. “I segnali discorsivi nel parlato e nello scritto.” In Scritto e parlato. Metodi, testi e contesti, ed. by Maurizio Dardano, Adriana Pelo and Antonella Stefinlongo, 79–97. Roma: Aracne Editrice.Google Scholar logo with link to Google Scholar
. 2001b. “Persistenze e variazioni nell’uso dei segnali discorsivi: primi risultati di un’analisi nell’italiano antico.” In Semantica e lessicologia storiche, ed. by Fábián Szuszanna and Giampaolo Salvi, 183–206. Rome: Bulzoni.Google Scholar logo with link to Google Scholar
. 2006. “Discourse markers in Italian: Towards a ‘compositional’ meaning.” In Approaches to Discourse Particles, ed. by Kerstin Fischer, 449–464. Amsterdam: Elsevier.Google Scholar logo with link to Google Scholar
Berman, Antoine. 2000. “Translation and the trials of the foreign.” In The Translation Studies Reader, ed. by Laurence Venuti, 284–297. London and New York: Routledge.Google Scholar logo with link to Google Scholar
Berretta, Monica. 1984. “Connettivi testuali in italiano e pianificazione del discorso.” In Linguistica testuale: atti del XV Congresso internazionale di studi, Genova, Santa Margherita Ligure, 8–10 maggio, 1981, ed. by Lorenzo Còveri and Monica Berretta, 237–254. Roma: Bulzoni.Google Scholar logo with link to Google Scholar
Berruto, Gaetano. 1987. Sociolinguistica dell’italiano contemporaneo. Rome: La Nuova Italia Scientifica.Google Scholar logo with link to Google Scholar
. 2006. Corso elementare di linguistica generale. Torino: Utet.Google Scholar logo with link to Google Scholar
. 2012. Sociolinguistica dell’Italiano Contemporaneo. 1 ed. Roma: La Nuova Italia scientifica.Google Scholar logo with link to Google Scholar
Biber, Douglas. 1988. Variation Across Speech and Writing. New York: Cambridge University Press. Google Scholar logo with link to Google Scholar
Bigliazzi, Silvia, Peter Kofler, and Paola Ambrosi. 2013. “Introduction.” In Theatre Translation in Performance, ed. by Silvia Bigliazzi, Peter Kofler, and Paola Ambrosi, 1–26. New York: Routledge. Google Scholar logo with link to Google Scholar
Blakemore, Diane. 1987. Semantic Constraints on Relevance. New York: Blackwell.Google Scholar logo with link to Google Scholar
Burton, Deidre. 1984. Dialogue and Discourse: A Sociolinguistic Approach to Modern Drama Dialogue and Naturally Occurring Conversation. Balmain: Law Book Co of Australasia.Google Scholar logo with link to Google Scholar
Cavagnoli, Franca. 2014. “Italian writers meet Australian writers: The responsibility of writers as translators.” Encountering Australia: Transcultural Conversations, Monash University Prato, 26 September 2014.Google Scholar logo with link to Google Scholar
Chiaro Nocella, Delia. 2000. “The British will use question-tags, won’t they? The case of Four Weddings and a Funeral.” In Tradurre il cinema: Atti del Convegno organizzato da G. Soria e C. Taylor, 29–30 Novembre 1996, ed. by Christopher Taylor and Giuliano Soria, 27–39. Trieste: Università degli studi di Trieste.Google Scholar logo with link to Google Scholar
Clark, Ian D. 2011. “The convincing ground aboriginal massacre at Portland Bay, Victoria: Fact or fiction?” Aboriginal History 351: 79–109. Google Scholar logo with link to Google Scholar
Connor, Michael. 2005. “The Australian massacre that wasn’t.” The Australian, March 9. [URL]. Last accessed 18 June 2019.
. 2007. “Convincing ground: An invented massacre.” Quadrant Online, December 1. [URL]. Last accessed 18 June 2019.
Coseriu, Eugenio. 1973. Lezioni di linguistica generale. Torino: Boringhieri.Google Scholar logo with link to Google Scholar
Culpeper, Jonathan. 2001. Language and Characterisation: People in Plays and Other Texts. Harlow: Pearson Education Limited.Google Scholar logo with link to Google Scholar
Cumpston, John S.. 1966. ‘Dutton, William (1811–1878)’, Australian Dictionary of Biography, National Centre of Biography, Australian National University, [URL], published first in hardcopy 1966, accessed online 3 August 2019.
Degand, Liesbeth. 2015. “Discourse markers in the translation of speech. Do film subtitles reflect spontaneous spoken conversation?” Fourth International Symposium on Discourse Markers in Romance Languages, Heidelberg, 6–9 May 2015.Google Scholar logo with link to Google Scholar
Fraser, Bruce. 1987. “Pragmatic formatives.” In The Pragmatic Perspective: Selected Papers from the 1985 International Pragmatics Conference, ed. by Jef Verschueren and Marcella Bertuccelli-Papi, 179–194. Amsterdam: John Benjamins. Google Scholar logo with link to Google Scholar
. 1988. “Types of English discourse markers.” Acta Linguistica Hungarica 38 (1/4): 19–33.Google Scholar logo with link to Google Scholar
. 1990. “An approach to discourse markers.” Journal of Pragmatics 14 (3): 383–395. Google Scholar logo with link to Google Scholar
. 1999. “What are discourse markers?” Journal of Pragmatics: An Interdisciplinary Journal of Language Studies 31 (1): 931–52. Google Scholar logo with link to Google Scholar
Hajlaoui, Najeh, and Andrei Popescu-Belis. 2013. “Translating English discourse connectives into Arabic: A corpus-based analysis and an evaluation metric.” Proceedings of the CAASL4 Workshop at AMTA 2012 (Fourth Workshop on Computational Approaches to Arabic Script-based Languages), San Diego, CA.Google Scholar logo with link to Google Scholar
Halliday, Michael A. K. , and Ruqaiya Hasan. 1976. Cohesion in English. London: Longman.Google Scholar logo with link to Google Scholar
Hardmeier, Christian. 2012. “Discourse in statistical machine translation: A survey and a case study.” Discours (11). Google Scholar logo with link to Google Scholar
Herman, Vimala. 1995. Dramatic Discourse: Dialogue as Interaction in Plays. London: Routledge.Google Scholar logo with link to Google Scholar
. 1998. “Turn management in drama.” In Exploring the Language of Drama. From Text to Context, ed. by Jonathan Culpeper, Mick Short, and Peter Verdonk, 306–322. New York: Routledge.Google Scholar logo with link to Google Scholar
Khachaturyan, Elizaveta. 2010a. “The function of mitigation in spoken language. Analysis of tak skazat’ (Russian) and diciamo (Italian).” OSLa – Oslo Studies in Languages 21: 393–412.Google Scholar logo with link to Google Scholar
. 2010b. “Si tu vois ce que je veux dire par là: l’analyse du verbe dire/dire en français et en italien.” Congrès International de Linguistique et Philologie Romane, Valencia, 6–11 September 2010.Google Scholar logo with link to Google Scholar
. 2011. “Una classificazione dei segnali discorsivi in italiano.” OSLa – Oslo Studies in Languages 3 (1): 95–116.Google Scholar logo with link to Google Scholar
Knott, Alistair, and Robert Dale. 1994. “Using linguistic phenomena to motivate a set of coherence relations.” Discourse Processes 18 (8): 35–62. Google Scholar logo with link to Google Scholar
Kruger, Alet. 2004. “The role of discourse markers in an Afrikaans stage translation of The Merchant of Venice.” Journal of Literary Studies/Tydskrif vir Literatuurwetenskap 20 (3–4): 302–34. Google Scholar logo with link to Google Scholar
Mariano, Sonia. 2002. “A study of the translation of discourse markers in Italian in Harry Potter and the Philosopher’s Stone, by J. K. Rowling.” B.A. thesis, Linguistics and Languages, Swartmore College.Google Scholar logo with link to Google Scholar
. 2018. “Performative rewriting: Foreign language performance as translation.” Paper presented at the Performance and Translation Seminar, Misano Adriatico, 9–12 April 2018.
Martinovic-Zic, Aida, and Carol Lynn Moder. 2004. Discourse Across Languages and Cultures. Amsterdam: John Benjamins.Google Scholar logo with link to Google Scholar
McCormick, Ian. 2013. The art of connection: The social life of sentences. Quibble Academic Publisher.Google Scholar logo with link to Google Scholar
Mence, David. 2013a. Convincing Ground, Unpublished script, workshopped by the Melbourne Theatre Company in 2009. Revised edition.Google Scholar logo with link to Google Scholar
Redeker, Gisela. 1990. “Ideational and pragmatic markers of discourse structure.” Journal of Pragmatics 14 (4): 367–381. Google Scholar logo with link to Google Scholar
Russell, Lynette. 2012. Roving Mariners: Australian Aboriginal Whalers and Sealers in the Southern Oceans, 1790–1870. Ed. by State University of New York and Muse Project. Albany: State University of New York Press.Google Scholar logo with link to Google Scholar
Sainz Gonzalez, Maria Eugenia. 2009. “¿Por qué resulta difícil comprender un marcador del discurso?” In Orale e intercomprensione tra lingue romanze. Ricerche e implicazioni didattiche, ed. by M. C. Jamet, 125–148. Venezia: Libreria Editrice Cafoscariana.Google Scholar logo with link to Google Scholar
Schiffrin, Deborah. 1987. Discourse Markers. New York: Cambridge University Press. Google Scholar logo with link to Google Scholar
Shakespeare, William. 1993 [1599–1602?]. “Hamlet.” In Grady Ward, ed., [URL]. Last accessed 18 June 2019.
Stame, Stefania. 1999. “I marcatori della conversazione.” In La conversazione. Un’introduzione allo studio dell’interazione verbale, ed. by Renata Galatolo and Gabriele Pallotti, 169–186. Milano: Raffaello Cortina Editore.Google Scholar logo with link to Google Scholar
Swan, Michael. 2005. Practical English Usage. 3rd ed. Oxford: Oxford University Press.Google Scholar logo with link to Google Scholar
Tarantini, Angela Tiziana. 2018. “Il Baleniere.” inTRAlinea [URL]. Last accessed 18 June 2019.
Taylor, Rebe. 2000. “Savages or saviours? – The Australian sealers and aboriginal Tasmanian survival.” Journal of Australian Studies 24 (66): 73–84. Google Scholar logo with link to Google Scholar
Vinciarelli, Alessandro, Paraskevi Chatziioannou, and Anna Esposito. 2015. “When the words are not everything: The use of laughter, fillers, back-channel, silence, and overlapping speech in phone calls. (Report).” Frontiers in ICT. Google Scholar logo with link to Google Scholar
Xu, Jainzhong, and Bo Cui. 2011. “Drama language translation.” Perspectives: Studies in Translatology 19 (9): 45–57. Google Scholar logo with link to Google Scholar
Zuckermann, Ghil’ad. 2009. “Hybridity versus revivability: Multiple causation, forms and patterns.” Journal of Language Contact 2 (2): 40–67. Google Scholar logo with link to Google Scholar
Cited by (1)

Cited by one other publication

Tarantini, Angela Tiziana
2021. Conclusions and Further Research. In Theatre Translation, ► pp. 185 ff. DOI logo

This list is based on CrossRef data as of 6 december 2025. Please note that it may not be complete. Sources presented here have been supplied by the respective publishers. Any errors therein should be reported to them.

Mobile Menu Logo with link to supplementary files background Layer 1 prag Twitter_Logo_Blue