The most hilarious character in these novels is Agatino Catarella, one of the police officers working with Montalbano. His main job at the police station of Vigàta is to receive phone calls and to report them to Montalbano. As Cerrato (2018) remarks, at a certain point in the novels it is revealed that Catarella managed to become a policeman thanks to his contacts in politics. Most likely, he was given the job of phone operator because it was the easiest task (Cerrato, 2018). Yet his awful relationship with the standard language and its grammar prevents him from doing his job well. In fact, Catarella is “the desk sergeant who answers the switchboard at the police station and mishears almost everything he is told” (Bailey, 2006). Catarella’s language, or catarellese (Vizmuller-Zocco, 2010), is a linguistic stew, whose basis is the so-called “italiano popolare”. This variety is also labelled as “semi-literate Italian” and it is the kind of Italian spoken by dialectal speakers, who learned it during their few years of schooling (D’Achille, 2010). Catarella’s semi-literate Italian, blended very often with bureaucratic formulas and attempts to use formal language, generates malapropisms, linguistic misunderstandings, mispronunciations, solecisms, and hypercorrection phenomena.

 

 

In the first odd dialogue between Catarella and Montalbano, the translator renders the same misunderstanding, which takes place because of Catarella’s mispronunciation of the expression in grado, which is turned to ingrato. In translation, Catarella’s mispronunciation of ranking, which becomes rankling, creates the same pun in the text. In this case, the pleonasm di pirsona pirsonalmenti, which is usually translated as you yourself in person, becomes poissonnally in poisson; the translator’s purpose is to maintain the repetition of the sound, no matter whether poissonnally in poisson does not make any sense to an English-speaking reader. The distorted form “in poisson” used by Sartarelli creates a double cross-reference; on the one hand, it recalls the expression “in person”, on the other, the term “poison”. The purpose of the translator is to recreate the same oddity we can find in the source text. Moreover, Catarella’s language is redundant and the translator tries to convey the same redundancy in the target text, as in but then he axed, the c’mishner did. In addition, Montalbano addresses Catarella with the diminutive Cat, which is closer to an English form, and not Cataré, typical of Sicilian noun short forms. Finally, we can notice that the term dottori is domesticated and rendered as chief, which is the English equivalent.