The Italian Compound Future in Literary Texts

The article presents a study of the Italian Compound Future, which is known to be used to perform different functions in a text. The way these functions are realized in different languages may vary considerably, which may pose a problem in translation. The study focuses on the functions of the Compound Future in a parallel corpus of Italian literary texts and their Slovene translations. After the extraction of the instances with the Compound Future and the analysis of their functions in the original texts, types of translation equivalents are singled out and cross-compared with the functions in the original. Beside the Slovene tenses used as translation equivalents of the Italian Compound Future, also other elements are observed in the translations, such as adverbial phrases that are used to convey the modal component which cannot be expressed by the Slovene tenses. It appears that with a few exceptions caused most probably by interference, the translators were mostly aware of the functional differences between temporal and epistemic instances of Compound Future and were able to transfer the meanings adequately.