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Article published In: Target
Vol. 30:1 (2018) ► pp.112–136

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Translation description for assessment and post-editing

The case of personal pronouns in translated Spanish

ORCiD logo with link | University of León
ORCiD logo with link | University of León
Published online: 7 February 2018
DOI logo with link
https://doi.org/10.1075/target.15098.ram
Abstract
This paper presents a corpus-based descriptive research procedure for the identification of significant divergences between original Spanish and Spanish translated from English. When considering the language pair English-Spanish, personal pronouns seem to be good markers of significant differences (anchor phenomena), since they must obligatorily occur in English, but not in Spanish. To test this hypothesis, empirical data have been extracted from a large reference corpus in Spanish (CREA) and from an English-Spanish parallel corpus (P-ACTRES), in both cases from the fiction subcorpora. Statistically significant differences have been found in some of the uses of personal pronouns, having textual and pragmatic implications in the target texts. The aim is to use the results obtained in the case of personal pronouns, together with results from other linguistic areas, to build a semi-automated tool for the post-editing of Spanish translations of texts written originally in English.
Article outline
  • 1.Introduction
  • 2.Object of study: Personal pronouns in English and Spanish
  • 3.Method and tools
    • 3.1 Tertium comparationis: Cross-linguistic labels
    • 3.2Corpora: CREA and P-ACTRES
    • 3.3Statistics
  • 4.Results
    • 4.1Numerical results
    • 4.2First person singular pronoun: yo
    • 4.3Second person singular pronoun: tú
    • 4.4Third person singular pronoun masculine: él
    • 4.5Second person singular formal pronoun: usted
  • 5.Discussion
    • 5.1Spanish personal pronouns as anchor phenomena
    • 5.2The translation assessment and post-editing tool PETRA
  • 6.Conclusions
  • Acknowledgements
  • References
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