This paper aims to describe hedging strategies in German and Italian sociological texts. The domain of sociology was chosen in consideration of the important role attenuating devices can play in this kind of discourse in order to express subtle nuances of meaning or communicative intention.
A bilingual review, containing articles of German and Italian sociologists together with their respective translations, gave the opportunity to conduct both a constrastive and a translational analysis. As a first step, the use of hedges in the original German and Italian articles was analysed in order to find out possible differences between the two languages and cultures. Indeed, the results confirmed the cultural boundedness described in previous studies on other languages and showed different preferences for particular types of hedges: German authors use attenuating devices mainly for the sake of precision, Italian authors mostly for interpersonal reasons. In the second part of the analysis, attention was focused on the problems that can be posed by the translation of hedges. Firstly, the linguistic devices used for hedging purposes may differ in the two languages, so that translators should not content themselves with “direct” equivalents but rather know what forms are most frequently used in the target language. Secondly, translators should consider whether to adapt the patterns of hedging to the conventions of the target language to achieve an equivalent effect. And lastly, it may difficult to determine the precise meaning attributed by an author to a given hedge: in the most complex cases, therefore, the correct interpretation will be obtained only with his consultation.
