In:Exploring and Exploiting Parallel Corpora of Spanish: The PaCorES corpus collection in language and translation education and research
Edited by Irene Doval and M. Teresa Sánchez Nieto
[Studies in Corpus Linguistics 129] 2026
► pp. 183–202
Translating English in as Spanish de (rather than en)
Grammatical insights and a pedagogical proposal for translation students
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Abstract
Translation students tend to translate the
English preposition in as the Spanish preposition
en in contexts where Spanish would require
another very common Spanish preposition: de. This
study aims to clarify when in should be translated
as de in order to avoid calques. To this end, it
analyzes the presented translation problem from a grammatical
perspective, proposing an explanation. Prepositional phrases
modifying nouns usually require de in Spanish for
full idiomaticity, albeit it should be noted that there are
exceptions. This study concludes by proposing a pedagogical approach
to enhance students’ understanding based on the freely accessible
parallel corpus PaEnS.
Article outline
- 1.Introduction
- 2.The English preposition in: Main semantic values and uses
- 2.1Basic functions of in: Location in space and within a period of time
- 2.2Other functions of in
- 3.The Spanish prepositions en and de: Main semantic values and uses
- 4.Problem observed in the translation classroom
- 5.Previous studies on the translation of in into Spanish
- 6.The maze disentangled? De as a grammatical rather than lexical element and the intricate case of the relative superlative
- 7.Teaching how to translate the preposition in
through PaEnS
- 7.1Exploration of the corpus and classification of occurrences of de as a translation for in
- 7.2Finding examples of specific uses of in and de
- 7.3Translation practice
- 8.Conclusions
Notes References
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