“All’s Well That Starts Well”: An Intralinguistic and Interlinguistic Perspective on the Use and Translation of Well

Abstract

Abstract Well is one of the most widely used, versatile pragmatic markers. Given its multiple functions, it may pose translation challenges, especially in hybrid oral texts translated to be read rather than heard. This paper investigates the presence and function of the pragmatic marker well in a parallel, aligned corpus of English TED Talk transcripts and their Italian translations. All occurrences of well in the English subcorpus were identified and classified to observe whether and how this marker was translated in the Italian transcripts. In the English subcorpus, well is found in sentence-/clause-initial position to introduce (a) rhetorical questions, (b) fictitious turn-takings between the speaker and other fictitious addressees, and (c) quotations. It was generally translated through a limited set of equivalents, which testifies to the standard approach used to transfer the pragmatic meaning of well into Italian, mostly relying on dictionary-based direct equivalents, e.g. beh and its orthographical variants.