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. 245–266
Visual perception and thinking-for-translating
A corpus-based study of German–Spanish narrative texts
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Abstract
This contribution examines the translation of
visual perception events in a German–Spanish parallel corpus of
narrative texts. Compared to the phenomena of manner-of-motion and
manner-of-speaking, manner-of-looking remains largely unexplored in
the “thinking-for-translating” hypothesis. The starting point of
this corpus-based study is Snell-Hornby’s (1983) list of German verbs of facial
expression and Rojo and
Valenzuela’s (2000) translation strategies identified in
a previous study on the translation of verbs of vision. After
comparing the resulting data with findings from comparable studies
dealing with the frames of motion, communication, and vision, the
study concludes that translators’ behaviors differ depending on the
frame: while manner-of-motion and manner-of-looking are often
omitted in German–Spanish translations, manner-of-speaking is
usually translated, or even added.
Article outline
- 1.Introduction
- 2.Theoretical background issues
- 2.1Semantic typology and thinking-for-translating
- 2.2Previous research on the translation of visual perception
- 3.Method and analysis
- 3.1Research aims and question
- 3.2Methodology
- 3.3Analysis and results
- 3.3.1Translation analysis of the general verbs (GEN)
- 3.3.2Translation analysis of specific verbs (SPEC)
- 3.3.3Verb lexicon
- 3.3.4Discussion
- 4.Conclusions
- Author queries
Acknowledgements Notes References
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