PhD Nisticó: The translation of linguistic impoliteness in English, French, and Italian

This doctoral dissertation is devoted to the study of the translation of linguistic impoliteness phenomena in fictional texts in English, French and Italian. I join three different research fields: interpersonal pragmatics, the pragmatics of fiction, and translation studies. This project is intended as an extension of my Master's thesis work on the translation into Italian of linguistic politeness stategies in Raymond Carver's short stories. The theoretical concepts I focus on are impoliteness, face-work, power, social distance and conflict negotiation, as well as the relationship between culture and language and the specificity of fictional data with regard to linguistic analysis (style, voice, dialogues, participation structure). I have built a multilingual and parallel corpus of contemporary short stories, written by an equal number of authors for each of the three source languages, and translated into the other two target languages. The unit of analysis within the texts are conflictual scenes. The data are coded and analyzed contrastively, both quantitatively and qualitatively. The aim of this work is threefold: first of all, to apply (im)politeness research on translation and fiction; second, to contribute to the scientific literature on impoliteness opposing English to less studies languages such as French and Italian; finally, and more particularly, to look for patterns of translation in realizing and conveying linguistic impoliteness, thus giving importance to the translation of pragmatic aspects which are deeply rooted in the context and culture of origin.

This PhD is supervised by Prof. Denis Jamet-Coupé and Prof. Miriam A. Locher.