As for the incidental function, when the Sicilian serves to give “flavour” to the story, there are examples in both novels. The following one is about an activity, tambasiàre, which means going from room to room without a goal and thinking about other matters. Russi defines it as a “multifaceted state of mind whose most salient components are a total unwillingness to act constructively and an indulgence in a sort of blissful laziness inherently accompanied by a specific physical behavior: going around and about performing trifling actions that are totally aimless” (Russi, 2020: 72). The translator chose to translate this activity with the verb keringeni [to orbit], which is part of the standard Hungarian vocabulary. The translator could have opted for a less used, maybe even dialectal term to describe this action.

 

 

In the following section, there are two words that are used for this purpose: on the one hand, the cangiu di la guardia [change of guard] which is translated őrsígvátás, later repeated in its correct form őrségváltás [change of guard]. The first variant contains a dialectal element, the use of /i:/, the close high front unrounded vowel instead of /e:/, the close-mid front unrounded vowel, a typical element in northeastern Hungarian dialects. The other change, the disappearance of ‘l’ is not a dialectal element, just the simplification in the pronunciation (see volt > vót, bolt > bót, váltás > vátás).

 

 

On the other hand, we have la mànnara, a place just outside of Vigàta that Montalbano’s friend, Gegè, uses for business purposes as he is a pimp. The mànnara gets bigger attention in La forma dell’acqua as part of the investigation is conducted there. The Sicilian word means fenced-off territory for animals (CamillerINDEX) for which Zaránd and Kovács’s translation seems more accurate in terms of the meaning (legelő means pasture in Hungarian). On the other hand, the word used by Lukácsi kocsisor means not only line/row/procession of cars, but is also used to describe the place where prostitutes are to be found, so the two connotative meanings complement each other more. In the following examples from La forma dell’acqua, a foreigner, Ingrid puts the accent on the wrong syllable (which would be the typical stress position) and gets corrected by Montalbano twice. The difference in Italian is only the position of the stressed syllable, thus the length of the vowel. In Hungarian, on the contrary, ‘e’ and ‘é’ are two different sounds: ‘e’ /ε/ is an open-mid unrounded vowel, ‘é’ /e:/ is a close-mid front unrounded vowel. Since in Italian it is a question of stress position, in Hungarian it would have sounded more natural with elongated consonants (‘g’ or ‘l’, e.g. legellő) rather than two significantly different vowels.

 

 

In the conversation below, a dialectal word is used to describe the pieces of wood which Montalbano cannot remember the name of in Italian. In the Hungarian translation, Lukácsi utilized a Hungarian dialectal word, celőke [stick, cudgel], which is as distant to Hungarian readers as the original word, farlacche, is to Italian.