Translation of Russian Business Slang Phraseology in Italian: Focus on Intermediary Language to Avoid Ambiguities

Abstract

In recent years Russia has changed rapidly from a socio-economic point of view. The economic changes have led to the development of slang phraseological units (herefrom, PUs) in the business communication. The Russian jargon PUs are taken from the dictionary Pochti seryoznyj slovar’ delovogo obscheniya (Pogrebnyak: 2007) and are translated into Italian, mostly via English, functioning as Intermediary Language (herefrom, IL). The materials consist in Russian slang PUs that are ambiguous, as it appears hard to understand, whether they are calques from IL or properly Russian expressions. The study underlines the importance of the IL to avoid ambiguity and of the idiomatic translation to both understand business culture and language. The functional equivalence is also taken into account as an interlinguistic equivalence strategy needed to find a communicative coincidence between Source Language (herefrom, SL) and Target Language (herefrom, TL) contexts. To conclude, the work attempts to facilitate informal business communication between Russian and Italian partners and to mitigate misunderstandings that may arise in the presence of cultural differences between the two countries.