Die Partikel doch in Wolf Haas' Roman Komm, süßer Tod und ihre Entsprechungen im Italienischen

German makes use of many modal particles, while in other languages, such as Italian, they are rather rare. Modal particles are used to underline the speaker’s mood or attitude towards a certain situation. Since there is no one-to-one correspondence between the two languages as far as modal particles are concerned, the translation of German modal particles into Italian represents often a problem. As a matter of fact, the translator is required to find the appropriate means of expressing the particular function of modality conveyed by the modal particle. This paper investigates how and under which conditions the German modal particle doch is translated into Italian. The analysis is based on the German novel Komm, süßer Tod written by Wolf Haas and its translation into Italian. Every occurrence of doch in the original text is compared with the correspondent segment of text in the Italian translation. This procedure allows the identification of certain translation patterns and strategies which are usually used by the translator.