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Article published In:
Target
Vol. 20:2 (2008) ► pp.275–296

Translations of ‘-ly’ adverbs of degree in an English-Spanish Parallel Corpus

| University of León, Spain
| University of León, Spain

This paper focuses on the translations of English -ly adverbs of degree into Spanish. The English suffix -ly has been traditionally associated with the expression of manner. However, it also actualises other meanings, in particular degree. In Spanish, the formal equivalents of -ly adverbs are adverbs ending in -mente, but the latter occur less frequently and with different pragmatic nuances. Adverbs of degree can be translated into -mente adverbs but also into other resources such as non -mente adverbs, prepositional phrases, adjectives, etc. The aim is to establish a taxonomy of translation solutions extracted from a parallel corpus in order to reveal cross-linguistic correspondences useful in translator training and translation quality assessment.

Keywords: adverbs of degree, parallel corpus, translation, -ly suffix, -mente suffix, translation quality assessment
Article outline
  • 1.Introduction
  • 2.Theoretical background
  • 3.Methods
    • 3.1Interlinguistic stage
      • 3.1.1Description of the parallel corpus
      • 3.1.2Data selection in the parallel corpus
      • 3.1.3Statistical analysis
    • 3.2Spanish intralinguistic stage: Description of the comparable corpus
  • 4.Results
    • 4.1Intralinguistic analysis: Lexico-grammatical regularities in English
    • 4.2Interlinguistic analysis: From English into Spanish
      • 4.2.1The translation of -ly adverbs of degree
      • 4.2.2 Register distribution
    • 4.3Intralinguistic analysis: Identifying -mente translationese in Spanish
  • 5.Discussion
  • 6.Conclusion
  • Acknowledgements
  • Notes
  • References
Published online: 3 November 2008
DOI logo
https://doi.org/10.1075/target.20.2.05ram
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