Translation description for assessment and post-editing: The case of personal pronouns in translated Spanish

Noelia Ramón and Camino Gutiérrez-Lanza
University of León

Abstract

This paper presents a corpus-based descriptive research procedure for the identification of significant divergences between original Spanish and Spanish translated from English. When considering the language pair English-Spanish, personal pronouns seem to be good markers of significant differences (anchor phenomena), since they must obligatorily occur in English, but not in Spanish. To test this hypothesis, empirical data have been extracted from a large reference corpus in Spanish (CREA) and from an English-Spanish parallel corpus (P-ACTRES), in both cases from the fiction subcorpora. Statistically significant differences have been found in some of the uses of personal pronouns, having textual and pragmatic implications in the target texts. The aim is to use the results obtained in the case of personal pronouns, together with results from other linguistic areas, to build a semi-automated tool for the post-editing of Spanish translations of texts written originally in English.

Keywords:
Publication history

Date received: 15 July 2015

Date accepted: 12 January 2018

Published online: 7 February 2018

Table of contents

Translation Studies as a distinct scientific discipline has brought us academic recognition in the past few decades. Many theoretical and descriptive studies have been carried out by different authors and in a wide range of socio-linguistic and cultural backgrounds. However, the close utilitarian links that should be established between theoretical and descriptive studies, on the one hand, and the applied activities that derive from them, on the other, are still not clearly developed (Toury [1995] 2012, 11). In many environments, tasks such as translation assessment, proofreading, post-editing, etc. are carried out by a type of professional on the rise, the language-services provider, who can benefit from translation research in a number of ways.

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