Abstract
The article describes the sources and the reading approaches adopted in analysing them. The purpose of this analysis was to identify the interpretative action of the investigating judge in the examined investigation files; i.e., those related to criminal trials conducted before the Venice Court of Assizes in the first years of the legislative integration of the Veneto region with the Kingdom of Italy (1871–1876). The term interpretation, in this context, refers on the one hand to the decoding of the socio-cultural substrate to which the people involved in the criminal trial belonged, and on the other hand, to the action of transcribing – translating into written form a dialectal or vernacular language variant. More specifically, we have examined several acts (the questioning of the defendants, the examinations of the witnesses and victims, the summarizing abstract of the investigation) that have allowed us, more evidentially, to reconstruct the traces of such an interpretative action.