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Corpus Use in Cross-linguistic Research: Paving the way for teaching, translation and professional communication
Edited by Marlén Izquierdo and Zuriñe Sanz-Villar
[Studies in Corpus Linguistics 113] 2023
► pp. 67–90

Chapter 4
“Ich bekomme es erklärt”

The dative passive in translation between German and Spanish: A study based on data from the PaGeS corpus

| University of Valladolid

Spanish lacks a construction that parallels the German dative passive, which presents the process from the recipient perspective while often leaving the agent implicit. The main aim of this chapter is to elucidate as to what extent the recipient perspective is maintained, and which voice resources (genus verbi) and translation techniques are involved in the translation of German passive constructions between German and Spanish. The evidence for the study is taken from the Parallel Corpus of German and Spanish (PaGeS). When translating sentences which include the bekommen/kriegen variants of the dative passive, translators into Spanish do not maintain the recipient perspective, but opt for, mainly, the agent perspective in about 40% of the examples under scrutiny. In these cases, simplification comes into play as a translation technique.

Keywords: dative passive, German, Spanish, translation techniques
Article outline
  • 1.Introduction: Focus, conceptual frame, and state of the art
  • 2.Aims of the study
  • 3.Methodology
  • 4.Results and discussion
    • 4.1Overall presence of the three passive variants in PaGeS across versions
    • 4.2Semantic roles in subject function in the dative passive and their prevalence in DE <> ES translation
    • 4.3Bekommen passive in translation: Translation techniques applied and changes in voice
      • 4.3.1Bekommen passive in DE > ES translation
      • 4.3.2Bekommen passive in ES > DE translation
    • 4.4Kriegen passive in translation: Translation techniques applied and changes in voice
      • 4.4.1Kriegen passive in DE > ES translation
      • 4.4.2Kriegen passive in ES > DE translation
  • 5.Conclusion
  • Notes
  • References
Published online: 2 November 2023
DOI logo
https://doi.org/10.1075/scl.113.04san
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