El tratamiento de los verbos de manera de movimiento y de los caminos en la traducción inglés-español de textos narrativos

Abstract

Differences in lexicalisation patterns for motion events (Talmy 1985, 1991, 2000) in English and Spanish have been said to result in two distinct narrative styles (Slobin 1991, 1996, 2004). On the one hand, English narratives provide dynamic descriptions loaded with manner-of-motion details and rich trajectories; on the other, in Spanish novels we find less dynamic descriptions which mainly focus on the endpoint of the trajectory and which contain less manner-of-motion information. By using a parallel corpus English-Spanish, in this study we explore (a) the translation problems in a narrative text caused by the different lexicalization patterns for motion events, (b) the strategies the translator uses in order to overcome those problems while trying to be faithful to the narrative style of the target language, and (c) the differences between the English source text and the Spanish target text in terms of dynamicity. Apart from supporting previous findings from the existing literature, this investigation shows that in Spanish the encoding of manner information beyond the verb phrase serves a compensatory function, and some types of paths are prone candidates to be lost in translation.