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

What is it about?

This paper investigates the presence and function of 'well' in 56 English TED Talk transcripts about astronomy and astrophysics and their Italian translations. It describes the functions this marker performs in such hybrid texts, which are oral texts written to be read rather than heard. In English talks, well was used predominantly to introduce a new sentence, with special reference to rhetorical questions, fictitious turn-takings, and quotations. The analysis then considered the translation of well in the Italian transcripts, where this marker was generally translated through a limited set of equivalents, which testifies to the standard approach used to transfer its pragmatic meaning into Italian, mostly relying on dictionary-based direct equivalents (e.g. beh, bene)._x000D_

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