In the previous works we analyzed, in contrast to Italian, two abundant conversational discourse markers in European Spanish, “hombre” and “bueno”. Now we want to analyze, also in contrast to Italian, another common conversational discourse marker in European Spanish, “claro”, because we have observed that a very few number of studies have focused on it with a contrastive linguistic perspective. For this purpose, first we will make a brief summary of “claro”’s main characteristics, then we will dedicate a few paragraphs to the treatment that this discourse marker received in some monolingual dictionaries and in other bilingual Italian-Spanish-Italian dictionaries. After that, we will recapitulate its main usage and value and, finally, we will discuss the translation solutions that we considered more appropriate in Italian, certainly the most interesting aspects of our work. Through them we will try to demonstrate that although at first sight “claro” tends to be almost automatically (and almost exclusively) translated as “certo”, which would imply the presence of few translation options compared with the translations of others conversational discourse markers as “bien”, “hombre” and “bueno”, on the other hand this discourse marker offers a wide range of translation solutions in the target language. This is the first of two works that we will dedicate to this subject. In our second article, which is in press, we will focus, always in contrast to Italian, on the combination between “claro” and others discourse markers of European Spanish. So far, there are not many pages that have been dedicated to this issue
