Before analysing the extracts, I tried to outline the role of dialect in Camilleri’s production; in many interviews, he stated that in writing he felt the need to draw on dialectal expressions and words, and that dialect was the right variety to convey the stories he wanted to write. For Camilleri, using only the standard language would have meant writing in a flat and anonymous language; he needed a compromise which could give expressiveness to the text. However, the language he uses pervades the entire structure of the novels: we can find non-standard speech in the narrative voice, in free indirect speech and in the dialogues. The use of non-standard language has the function both of conveying irony and of representing reality through the different characters’ voices.

The issues mentioned above cannot be overlooked by a translator. This is why Sartarelli tries to maintain faithfully the function of Camilleri’s language. However, many linguistic features are lost in translation. In fact, Sartarelli neutralises105 the narrative voice and the free indirect speech of Montalbano’s thought and renders them in standard English. The reason is explained by him in many interviews: he preferred to maintain the rhythm and fluency of Camilleri’s discourse in the source text. He also neutralises dialogues between many characters who draw on dialectal forms. Yet, despite using a standard language, Sartarelli attempts to recreate the same irony as the source text. He achieves it by using borrowings, literal translations, glosses within and outside the text, and colloquialisms. The text appears exoticised; for instance, the readers can easily come across Sicilian words referring to food, which are then explained by the translator; they can also find entire Sicilian idioms, which are sometimes left untranslated or translated literally and then explained. These strategies and others used by Sartarelli render many nuances typical of Sicilian, and also Italian, culture.

Sartarelli’s ability to play with what the English language could offer him can be seen in the translation of Catarella’s idiolect and of Adelina’s language. Catarella’s linguistic mixture is the result of dialect interfering with a poor knowledge of the Italian language and of a “melting pot” of pronunciation and grammatical mistakes, which generates malapropisms, pleonasms, and ironic misunderstandings. Sartarelli reproduces this linguistic stew in the target text by creating an English version of Catarella’s language; he draws on forms belonging to the Brooklynese variety spoken by those policemen working in New York who have Sicilian origins. Moreover, he tries to manipulate the English language in order to shape the same puns and ironic misunderstandings that we can find in the source text. As for Adelina’s dialect, he manages to create an “eye-dialect” in the target text using a “speech defect” strategy (Berezowski, 1997). This means that he creates lexical items and syntactic patterns by playing with TL spelling conventions and phonology. In the target text, Adelina thus gives the impression of speaking a non-standard variety of English.

By adopting these solutions, the translator manages to remain faithful to the role of Camilleri’s language in the source text. Despite the neutralisation of the ST dialectal features, in many cases, Sartarelli compensates by adopting strategies that foreignise the target text. It is relevant to underline though that readers of detective novels may not be willing to make an effort to understand a linguistic experiment; this is why Sartarelli considers fluency and readability more important than a possible linguistic attempt at recreating Camilleri’s non-standard language. In this way, the American translator manages to balance readability and faithfulness to the source text.