"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 ofreaders. 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 theliterature to possible differences in the way text-organizing elements are used in Italian translated and non-translated texts. This paper explores the use of connectives in a corpus of Italian translated texts in economics, comparing these both with theEnglish source texts and with comparable Italian non-translated texts. The analysis aims to show how the frequency of connectives is, overall, higher in the non-translatedthan in the translated 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 followingthis tendency towards explicitation, Italian translators favour norms of text production that are typical of the target language. Reference is also made to the possibility of considering such cases of explicitation as steps in a decision-making process wheretranslators are seen to weigh adherence to target-language conventions against the risk of misinterpreting the source text.