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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. 91–107

Chapter 5
Exploring near-synonyms through translation corpora

A case study on ‘begin’ and ‘start’ in the English-Spanish parallel corpus PACTRES

| University of León

This chapter explores the Spanish translations of the English ingressive verbs ‘begin’ and ‘start’ in the parallel corpus PACTRES. ‘Begin’ and ‘start’ are considered near-synonyms and the aim of this paper is to trace any semantic differences between them through an analysis of their Spanish translations. I obtained the translational options in Spanish for ‘begin’ and ‘start’ and compared the divergences using statistical significance tests. The findings revealed that the verb ‘start’ presents a wider range of ingressive verbs as translational options in Spanish, thus pointing towards a larger number of associated sense relations than the verb ‘begin’. This study illustrates the usefulness of parallel corpora in highlighting semantic differences between near-synonyms in the source language, here English.

Keywords: near-synonyms, parallel corpora, translation strategies, sense relations
Article outline
  • 1.Introduction
  • 2.Theoretical framework
    • 2.1Aspectual verbs: ‘Begin’ and ‘start’
    • 2.2Synonymy
  • 3.Data and method
    • 3.1The English-Spanish parallel corpus PACTRES
    • 3.2The data
  • 4.Results and discussion
    • 4.1Comparing syntactic patterns of ‘begin’ and ‘start’
    • 4.2Spanish translations of ‘begin’
    • 4.3Spanish translations of ‘start’
    • 4.4Comparing the Spanish translations of ‘begin’ and ‘start’
    • 4.5Spanish ingressive verbs as translations of ‘begin’ and ‘start’
  • 5.Conclusions
  • References
Published online: 2 November 2023
DOI logo
https://doi.org/10.1075/scl.113.05ram
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