Tradurre Camilleri: dall’artifizio linguistico alla teorie traduttologiche

Despite the considerable interest and the lively debate generated by dialect translation theory during the last years, results are still controversial and rather unsatisfactory. A possible explanation may be the disproportion between theoretical and descriptive studies, with the former being insufficient to allow the latter to be firmly rooted in principles, theories and models. A closer look at existing theories on this issue reveals how distant they are from daily practice when the translator finds himself alone in translating a complex dialectal text. Hence the title of the present article, which reverses the direction of the methodological approach with the aim of detecting objective data from which to go back to the roots of a shared theory. The multiple peculiarities of Camilleri’s multilingual enunciation may provide elements of representativeness suitable to generalize their translation procedures and draw meaningful conclusions. Accordingly, after a brief excursus on the evolution of dialect translation studies, the paper explores a new translation hypotheses in the Spanish language concerning Camilleri’s language, in the light of the classical levels of linguistic analysis (i.e., phonetic-phonological, morphosyntactic and lexical-semantic). It thus focuses, on the one hand, on the diastratic and diaphasic dimension, in order to transfer, through similar linguistic artifices, the comical and estranging effects that such a language may have on Italian readers, and, on the other, on the exploitation of the diatopic variation by means of the linguistic expedient of intra-sentential code-mixing.