Northanger Abbey for Italian readers – the female translators, the language of the quotidian, irony

Jane Austen’s ‘naturalism’, as well as the lack of improbabilities in her novels, may have contributed to making the interest in her works and her persona so lasting and transnational. Furthermore, Austen uses comparatively more words referring to women and her translators have been mostly female, thus voicing a female perspective that may be in tune with the increasing gender-sensitivity of our age. In her novels, we mostly read of the daily life of families and their stories, conversations and gossip developing through the Austenian alternation of direct speech and free indirect speech. Seemingly, her narrative stance is rooted in her concentration on decoding emotions related to realistic interactions, in a language that is quotidian rather than melodramatic. Only in Northanger Abbey, a parody of Radcliffean Gothic literature, do we hear of scary castles and mysterious deaths, but the authorial stance is perceivably ironic. From an applied translation studies perspective, this study aims at investigating how some of these features, irony in particular, surface in the translated texts, specifically in the Italian translations of NA. The difficulties of rendering the pervasive irony of the narrative voice in NA – often leading to a ‘lost-in-translation’ condition – are taken into account by highlighting the linguistic features that convey this fictional dimension from a translation criticism perspective.