Dabei-Constructions in humanities Texts of the German Contemporary Language and their Translation into Italian

This article deals with the translation of the pronominal adverb dabei ('in doing so') into Italian. The focus is on the anaphoric function of dabei as a connector (e. g.: Er hat von ihr erzahlt. Dabei hat er weit in die Zeit zuruckgegriffen. 'Fle told about her. In doing so he has gone far back in time.'). The connector dabei belongs to the comitative connectors besides indem ('iby') and wobei ('whereby'). It is considered to be typical for German. There is no direct, literal counterpart to dabei in Italian. The study provides for a synchronous language comparison between German and Italian. A parallel corpus of German/Italian humanities texts will be used to document which translation procedures are used in Italian and which translation variants are common or less common in the language to capture the semantic relations expressed by different constructions with dabei. Furthermore, the study is solution-oriented, i.e. it attempts to work out criteria for deciding between different translation variants.