“Relativamente semplici da tradurre”: meccanismi di attenuazione e difficoltà traduttive

The paper focuses on the use of hedging devices in political speeches and on the problems they can pose to translators. The analysis was carried out on a corpus of proceedings of the European Parliament’s plenary sessions. These texts, although admittedly complex and not entirely unproblematic for a description of spoken discourse, are particularly suitable for studying translation procedures and translations problems, as they can provide the translation scholar with a collection of both comparable texts (for the present analysis , the speeches of German and Italian speaking politicians) and parallel texts (their translations into Italian and German, respectively, produced by highly experienced translators). After a definition of the concept of hedge as adopted in this study and a brief description of the corpus, the paper dwells on the procedures which are most frequently applied in the translation of hedges and hedge-containing passages, as well as on the degree of freedom the translations display. In the last section, some problematic cases are discussed, which range from “real” translation mistakes due to a misinterpretation of a hedge to subtler modifications affecting the pragmatic force or the argumentative strategy of the original text. The examples show that the translation of hedges is not as simple as is sometimes assumed: in order to produce a pragmatically “functioning” translation the translator must carefully assess the interplay between the propositional, epistemic and interpersonal content of the hedging device.