A Pragmatic-Based Approach to Translation: Mi Dai?/Dammi! And Дай! In the Parallel Russian-Italian Corpus

This essay focusses on how the knowledge of cross-cultural pragmatics can provide a theoretical background for the translation practice, especially in the search for equivalent functions. This study concentrates on the Russian and the Italian languages and on the speech act of requesting, in that not only is request amongst the most frequent speech acts, but also it is realised in different ways in the two target languages. In particular, whereas imperative is a common strategy used in Russian requests, its presence is restricted to informal bilateral requests in the Italian-speaking contexts. In order to investigate how the imperative is distributed in requests translated from Russian into Italian and vice versa, and whether such translations are appropriate from a pragmatic perspective, in our study we have analysed the occurrences of the imperative request “give (me)!” in Russian (дай!) and Italian (dammi!) in the parallel Russian-Italian corpus of the National Corpus of the Russian Language.