The pragmatic function in the translation of discourse markers. The case of the interjection “beh” in the Spanish versions of the Racconti romani (Alberto Moravia, 1953)

Abstract

The aim of this article is to analyse the translation treatment of the interjection “beh” in the two spanish versions of the Racconti romani (Alberto Moravia, 1953) published to date (Attilio Dabini, 1957; Esther Benítez, 1970). This choice is due to the fact that “beh” is the interjection most frequently used by the author throughout the work, so that its analysis can give us important clues about the significant values of the interjection, its discursive function and the translational difficulties it poses. The study is approached from an interdisciplinary perspective, taking into account literary studies, linguistic variety, compositional procedures of narrative orality, discourse pragmatics and translation studies. Once the functional values of this interjection have been broken down from a comparative Italian-Spanish perspective (Poggi, 1995; Martín Zorraquino and Portolés Lázaro, 1999), the results of both translations are evaluated from the perspective of pragmatics. To this end, they are classified along two essential axes: the translations maintain the pragmatic effect or they do not maintain the pragmatic effect. Among the conclusions of the study, we highlight the interrelation between the interjection and discourse markers at the conversational level, as well as the variability of the meaning of these discursive particles depending on the position or intonation —not so much at the lexical or syntactic level— and the importance of the translation’s status as a function of the discourse..