“The relations of signs to interpreters”

With examples drawn from Italian translations of Jane Austen, George Eliot and Virginia Woolf, this chapter explores the analytical possibilities of politeness and implicature theory for the translator scholar and, implicitly, the translator. A section on reader–writer relations is followed by one focusing on the interaction of characters within narrative: throughout, the focus is not on the best or most correct way of translating the pragmatic substance of fiction, but on understanding the inevitable pragmatic changes occurring in the transition from source to target.