Abstract:

This article discusses the phenomenon of the fascinative effect of the text in discourse. The research material is taken from the spoken facts of the Italian political discourse, i.e. texts, statements, vivid figurative nominations. The fascinative effect is a part of the total communicative impact that a political subject (actor) exerts on the mass audience. The main task of the communicative influence consists in exercising pragmatic regulation, whose function is to convince, to impart to the collective addressee’s thought a ‘necessary’ (in actor’s view) direction. Fascination is the external side of the communicative impact that the text develops. Generally, all formal and expressive means – poetic form, rhetorical form and the expressive and/or figurative form of nominations – are involved in creating fascinative effect. In a public political text, fascination enhances pragmatic regulation and helps persuasion.

Fascination usually plays an auxiliary role in a political text. However, fascination may come to the fore becoming the main factor of influence. In these cases, it acquires a manipulative function, becomes a tool of manipulation with the only purpose: to hide the shortcomings or deficiencies of the content. Fascinative manipulation evokes reminiscences of facts stored in the socio-cultural experience (e.g. "Forza Italia! - the name of a political party, echoing the slogan of the Italian national soccer team).

The regulatory and manipulative language resources are important to consider in the translation and language teaching, primarily at the advanced stage. The article analyzes the cases of rendering some culturally significant nominations in Italian-Russian translation. When teaching professionally-oriented translation, it is necessary to pay attention to the factors of the regulatory impact presented in speech signs, in order to separate techniques of persuasion from manipulative ones.

The article analyzes the speech facts in the Italian media space in order to identify their fascinative effects. A short excursus to the history of the Italian political parties’ names, from the First Republic to the present, was conducted and the names were analyzed in terms of their fascinative effect. A number of speeches of Italian politicians, who actively resorted to fascinative techniques in the process of political communication, are looked into.

When testing the theoretical provisions of the study, students were asked first to translate a professionally oriented text devoid of figurative or expressive tools, and then to translate an excerpt of a speech with dominating fascinative effects, and finally to compare their two translations.

As a result of the stated theoretical theses and the analysis, we can conclude that associative figurative-expressive fasciation is an important resource to achieve manipulative influence in Italian political discourse. At this level, significant semantic cultural and historical differences between languages, useful to consider in the process of language learning and translation, are apparent.

Keywords:

Professionally oriented translation, fascinative effect, political communication, political discourse, Italian language, communicative regulation.