In the next example, Montalbano is talking to Saro’s neighbours. There are obvious errors in the translation: in the sentence Turiddru! Turiddru! the old woman calling to her husband named Turiddru to go quickly to her, she is not inviting the inspector in like in the Hungarian text. Another error of translation is towards the middle: the old lady is saying “You see that they have fled as to not finish in jail?” not, as the Hungarian translation says: “If they hadn’t fled, they would have gone to jail for sure!”.

 

 

Agent Balassone is the only character in the two novels who speaks a different dialect, Milanese. Lukácsi chose to translate the first segment, but not the second one: seen that the first enunciation is easier to understand because it is more similar to the standard language, Italian readers and as well as Montalbano can understand it without any complications. The second one, on the other hand, is not so clear, and the translator chose to conserve its alienness in the context.

 

 

The next example is a written note by Adelina, Montalbano’s maid. The written text presents characteristics of the Sicilian and is very similar to the spoken language, so we can conclude that she is not very well-educated. The Hungarian translation reflects this: wrong consonants, dialectal words (e.g. máma [today]), and contracted phrases (e.g. nemehet [cannot eat]).

 

 

Apart from the dialectal elements, there are also other linguistic moments worth of attention. In La forma dell’acqua, Giorgio is described as an angel-like creature, which is in total uniformity with the Stilnovo thought of the dame being an angel, a mediator between God and the poet. The small section cited below reflects the Stilnovo language, not only in the choice of words but also in the melody of the phrase, a component missing in the Hungarian translation. The words used in the Hungarian translation are not particularly poetic, thus are not able to carry the style of Stilnovo poetry.

 

 

Since Montalbano is a police officer, he has to be able to carry out official conversations with his superiors. In the first example, Montalbano is talking to the prefect in Montelusa, using the typical language of bureaucracy. As we can observe here, the Hungarian translation does not render the legal language which differs from normal speech on more than one level (e.g. vocabulary or syntax): the complicated syntax of the Italian sentence is divided into two separate sentences; the words highlighted (acclarare, ribadire, trasparenza) are not ones that the prefect “uses often” but which “are part of the prefect’s vocabulary” as a member of the legal system and should thus be translated with lexemes from the legal language.

 

 

The same thing happens when Montalbano gives a certificate to Saro: it is considered a legal document, and the language needs to reflect that. The language is the same as in the previous example, but this time the sequence is not divided into different sentences and with few exceptions, even the legal language is rendered faithfully. On the other hand, it is missing the closing formula In fede [Yours faithfully], a must-have element of these documents.

 

 

As we have seen, both novels contain linguistic variations which are worth the attention of translation criticism. Lukácsi, in her translation of the novel Il cane di terracotta, tried to render the linguistic variety present in Camilleri’s novels by making use of dialectal words such as csimota [child], éccaka [night], máma [today], gyüssz [(you) come] and vóna [would], and also utilizing dialectal-sounding suffixes like -bül. In contrast, Kovács and Zaránd, in their translation of La forma dell’acqua, did not attempt to do this, but it is also worth noting that the novel translated by them contains not many significant moments of linguistic interest, as it was Camilleri’s first Montalbano-novel and he was probably trying not to “overuse” the Sicilian elements in his book, but make readers get used to it. From Russi’s analysis (Russi, 2018) emerges that the phonological features have a higher incidence than morphological, morphosyntactic, or lexical ones, which contradicts claims that “the lexical level is the most used by Camilleri” (Santulli, 2010: 97 cited in Russi, 2018) or that Camilleri’s operations “concern only the lexical level and it leaves intact the grammatical and syntactic structures” (Pistelli, 2003: 22 cited in Russi, 2018). Similar changes in phonology can be (and have been) made in Hungarian: the use of /i/ instead of /ε/ or /e/ (e.g. békében > békiben [in peace], nyelvén > nyelvin [in his/her language]) or even the closing of /o/ in /u/ (e.g. honnan > hunnan [from where]) can be observed in Lukácsi’s translation. However, these changes appear mostly in dialogues, so it is limited to the portrayal of characters and does not appear in the narrator’s voice.