On translating Italian word reduplication into English

This paper focuses on the translation of Italian word reduplication into English, e.g. piccino piccino (teeny weeny). Word reduplication is common in Italian. From a sociolinguistic point of view, it is a diastratic, colloquial variant, extremely frequent in substandard Italian. Although not widely perceived, it is also present – but, it seems, not so common - in English (e.g. bad bad news). Now, if reduplication is a numerically minor pattern in English, and a relatively more marked choice, when it comes to its English translations what we expect is systematic recourse to other linguistic devices, most notably predicate (i.e. head) to intensifier collocations (e.g. vecchio vecchio [very old]), intensifying similes (e.g. zitto zitto [quiet as a wisper]), and superlative predicates (e.g. cattivo cattivo cattivo [disgusting]). It makes sense therefore to focus on the implications for the translator. Specifically, on the basis of a small collection of literary texts, we shall carry out a qualitative analysis of what exactly translates meaning, textual and discourse-pragmatic functions of Italian reduplication within the framework of Dressler and Merlini Barbaresi’s (1994) morphopragmatics.