A corpus-based study of the use of Spanish demonstratives as translation equivalents of English demonstratives

Abstract

This article aims at finding traces of translationese in the use of Spanish demonstratives in translations by (a) studying the resources used in Spanish to translate English demonstratives, (b) rating to what extent Spanish demonstratives are preferred translation equivalents of English demonstratives and (c) assessing the use of Spanish demonstratives in translated texts on the basis of a quantitative comparison of their frequency rates of occurrence with those of non-translated Spanish texts. For the first part of the study, (a) and (b), we will make use of the P-ACTRES (http://actres.unileon.es/demo.html) parallel corpus (English texts and their corresponding translations into Spanish), which will provide us with an inventory of translation solutions for English demonstratives – including Spanish demonstratives and a range of other idiomatic means of expression. For the second part of the study, (c), we will analyse the findings of the translated part of P-ACTRES as compared with those of CREA (http://corpus.rae.es/creanet.html) (the Corpus by the Spanish Royal Academy).

Keywords:

• demonstratives
• translation
• English
• Spanish
• corpus
• translationese

Acknowledgements

Research for this article has been funded by the regional government of Castilla y León, Spain (LE003A05) and by the Spanish Ministry of Education (HUM2005-01215).

Notes

1. In our case, Spanish, as he refers to Spanish–English translations and we are dealing with the other directionality: English–Spanish.

2. For more information about P-ACTRES, see Izquierdo et al. (2008).