L’emploi du passif dans la traduction en italien du pronom clitique indéfini on

The French clitic pronoun on is a third person singular pronoun, which can have either an indefinite meaning – in such a case it refers to one or more people the speaker cannot or does not want to identify – or a personal meaning – in such a case it replaces all other subject personal pronouns. Since a pronoun sharing the same characteristics does not exist in Italian, translators are forced to resort to other solutions. Based on a parallel corpus of examples taken from contemporary French prose, this contribution will first present the basic features of the pronoun, then illustrate the main translating solutions adopted by professional translators to convert each type of on. Among these, a fundamental role is played by the clitic pronoun si (impersonal or passive), which can translate all types of on, and by the periphrastic passive, which can translate the two most frequent types of on (on générique and on spécifique). The third and last part of the present contribution will be thus devoted to the peculiarities of these two solutions, with special focus on the restrictions which make its use limited for translators