This empirical study focuses on the use of Spanish clitic pronouns when they function as accusative or as dative clitics in the translation tasks performed by university students of Spanish as a foreign language (SFL). The participants were 35 Belgian Dutch-speaking students of SFL (Level B2) from the Department of Translation, Interpreting and Communication of Ghent University (Belgium), who are enrolled in the Translation course. They were asked to perform two tasks: (1) to create an audio description script in Spanish, and (2) to translate the English dialogues into Spanish from a sequence taken from the film The Help (Taylor 2011). The written texts they produced were compared to those written by 39 Erasmus Spanish native students, who carried out the same tasks. The results showed that the Belgian students produced significantly fewer clitic pronouns, especially in the case of dative clitic doubling, than those produced by the Spanish natives. As for the differences between the two modes of audiovisual translation, the findings revealed that the Belgians produced more accurate results in the interlingual than in the intersemiotic task. The results of our study also made it clear that more attention should be paid to the use of redundant clitic pronouns in the SFL classroom.
