Translation as a source of pragmatic interference?: An empirical investigation of French and Italian cleft sentences

In this paper, we pursue two main (interconnected) goals, relying on a comparable and parallel corpus of French and Italian cleft sentences. First, we assess the most typical formal and functional properties of clefts in these languages, while also considering variation due to the different types of data. Second, we verify the presence of interference in the translation of clefts from French into Italian. Translators’ choices mostly align with information-structural patterns found in original Italian texts, but word-for-word translation styles can increase the frequency of less-common cleft types in Italian, such as Broad Focus and Information Focus clefts. However, odd or infelicitous pragmatic effects arise only in very few cases.