3.3. Eye-Dialect in Translation: Adelina

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Adelina is Montalbano’s housekeeper, who expresses herself almost exclusively in dialect. As seen the examples below, in Adelina’s speech we can thus find dialectal lexical and phonetic features (dumani ‘tomorrow’, figliu ‘son’, spitali ‘hospital’, quattru ‘four’, peju ‘worse’, adenzia ‘help’, picciotta ‘girl’) and also morphosyntactic ones1 (sta a babbiari ‘is joking’). Adelina’s dialect in the dialogues is rendered in translation with expressions and ways of speaking typical of a colloquial, informal register, such as gotta; the sounds at the end and at the beginning of the syllables are often omitted, as in an’ (and), ’is (his), ’em (them), ’er (her), don’ (don’t), younges’ (youngest), as in Table 5. Moreover, in the original text, Adelina addresses Montalbano with the title dottori, which is a mix between the dialect dutturi and the Italian dottore. The solution Sartarelli adopts for Catarella’s dottori cannot be applied for Adelina’s as well, because the English term chief denotes someone who is higher in rank; in Adelina’s case, Montalbano is not her chief, rather her employer. Sartarelli does not find an equivalent in English and prefers to maintain the Sicilian nuance, borrowing the Italian term Signore and not translating it as Sir, which is the English equivalent.
 

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Table 5
Original text
English translation
A: “Nun m’arriconosci, dottori? Adelina sugnu.”
A: “Don’ you rec’nize me, signore? Is Adelina.”
M: “Adelina! Che c’è?”
M: “Adelina! What’s the matter?”
A: “Dottori, ci vuliva fari avvirtenzia che oggi non pozzo avveniri.”
A: “Signore, I wanted a tell you I can’t come today.”
M: “Va bene, non…”
M: “That’s OK, don’t…”
A: “E non pozzo avveniri né dumani né passannadumani.”
A: “An’ I can’t come tomorrow neither, an’ a day after that neither.”
M: “Che ti succede?”
M: “What’s wrong?”
A: “La mogliere di mè figliu nicu la portaro allo spitali ch’avi malo di panza e io ci devu abbadari ’e figli ca sunnu quattru e il chiù granni ch’avi deci anni è unu sdilinquenti peju di sò patre.”
A: “My younges’ son’s wife was rush to the hospital with a bad bellyache and I gotta look after‘er kids. There’s four of ‘em and the oldest is ten and he’s a bigger rascal than ‘is dad.”
A: “Va bene, Adelì, non ti dare pinsèro”
M: “It’s OK, Adelina, don’t worry about it”
(L’odore della notte, 57).
(The Scent of the Night, 56).
 

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On the scraps of paper she leaves for Montalbano (Table 6), Adelina’s dialect is adjusted to the written form and becomes a pseudo-dialect; almost none of the forms she writes down belong entirely to Sicilian dialect (totori, manno, anichi, amangiari, tonno). She tries to write in what she thinks might be a more correct variety of language, perhaps closer to Italian, because she wishes to appear educated or formal; yet the result is the hyper-correction phenomenon. When translating Adelina’s notes, Sartarelli tries to reproduce a non-standard variety in the target text, or rather an “eye-dialect”, as Tomaiuolo (2009) points out. He makes use of what Berezowski (1997) identifies as the speech defect strategy, which implies the creation of lexical items and syntactic patterns, with the adoption of the target language (TL) spelling conventions and phonology. In fact, Sartarelli takes forms that belong undoubtedly to an informal register (workin, gonna), but he also manipulates words and endeavours to find phonetic stratagems in order to give the impression of being dialectal (Im, neece, somtin, beck, afta, tomorra). Sartarelli’s intention is to mark visually the speech of Adelina as non-standard, as he does with other dialect-only-speaking characters that feature in the novels.
 

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Table 6
Original text
English translation
“Totori, ci manno a dari adenzia a la me niputi Cuncetta ca è piciotta abbirsata e facinnera e ca ci pripara macari anichi cosa di amangiari io tonno passannadumani”
Mr Inspector, Im sending my neece Concetta to help out. She’s a smart an hard workin girl an she gonna make you somtin to eat too. I come beck day afta tomorra
(L’odore della notte, 88).
(The Scent of the Night, 89).
1 Progressive periphrasis stari a + infinitive (sta a babbiari) vs Italian stare + gerund (sta scherzando).
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