PhD Nisticò: Conflict in Translation: a Pragmatic Study of English, French, and Italian Written Short Fiction

This project examines the translation of conflict in written fiction. As a central driver of narrative, conflict has a direct impact on intercharacter relations, making it a particularly revealing site for cross-cultural analysis. Drawing on a corpus of short stories and their translations between English, French, and Italian — each language functioning both as source and target — the study investigates how translators reshape the pragmatic force of conflictual discourse. Implementing a qualitative contrastive analysis, it focuses on key interpersonal cues such as forms of address and character reference, discourse presentation (i.e. speech and thought reporting expressions), and taboo language. It shows how translators subtly yet actively influence the perception of characters, relationships, and intercharacter conflict by modifying appellatives and pronoun (un)markedness, the illocutionary force and the representation of paralinguistic cues of character interaction, and the presence of taboo expressions. 

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