Translations of Representations of Moving and Saying from English into Spanish

Abstract

This paper presents a systemic-functional contrastive analysis of an original English text – a chapter, ‘The Land of Shadow’ from J. R. R. Tolkien’s The Lord of the Rings – and its Spanish translation, ‘El País de la Sombra’, focusing on the shifts in translation of representations of motion and of saying. These two realms of experience provide an interesting contrast in terms of experiential complexity, as more transitivity parameters are expected to be involved in construing human experience of motion through three-dimensional space than of speech events. From this we can predict (a) that there will be greater differences in the translation of representations of motion than in the translation of representations of saying, and (b) that the differences in the representation of motion will largely reflect the systemic differences between two languages. Our analysis demonstrates that translation shifts in the area of verbs of saying are relatively insignificant whereas the translation of representations of motion extends over the scale from no shift to considerable shift, depending on the extent to which the systems of English and Spanish differ in their modeling of the experience of motion through space and that there tend to be shifts where systemic differences necessitate such shifts.

Keywords:

• translation
• moving
• saying
• systemic-functional
• contrastive

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author(s).

Notes

1 Translated into Spanish by Matilde Horne and Luis Domènech.

2 Rojo and Valenzuela (2001) present a study of the translation of verbs of saying from English into Spanish against the background studies of the translation of verbs of motion from English into Spanish, but they do not compare the translation of saying and motion in the same parallel corpus. See further Section 2.

3 The notion of translation as the recreation of meaning (e.g., Matthiessen 2001) naturally includes the re-instantiation of meaning.

4 We started our investigation of translations of Tolkien’s The Lord of the Rings. At the time, we weren’t aware of the work by Slobin and his group although results had already been published. But we think our selections of texts were motivated by similar considerations – translations into many different languages of a text involving a very difficult journey where the author of the source text, Tolkien, draws creatively on the resources of English to evoke the sense of the challenges.

5 This example is reminiscent of the type of constructed example used by Talmy (1985) to demonstrate the difference between English and Spanish, e.g., English ‘the boat floated into the cave’ vs. Spanish: ‘the boat entered the cave floating’. As various linguists have observed, because of the different affordances provided by the two lexicogrammars at this point, Spanish speakers are likely to dispense with the specification of manner of motion even though they can expand the clause to include it.