Translating additive connectors from English into Spanish and vice versa

Abstract

This contrastive study aims to analyze and compare the usages of one type of sentence connectors, reinforcing additive connectors, in English and in Spanish through a corpus-based approach, which relies on bidirectional translation data. The analysis includes behavioral profiles of each of the list of connectors in each language, comparisons among them, comparisons between original texts and translated texts in both directions, cross-register differences, translational options, and the connectors’ mutual correspondence, which shows the degree of equivalence of each pair of connectors based on how often they are translated into each other. The results show important differences in the use of reinforcing additive connectors, mainly connected with (a) the more even distribution in English as compared with the great predominance of one connector in Spanish, además; (b) a more marked tendency for explicitation in Spanish and for the use of zero translation in English; (c) generally low mutual correspondence values, which seem to reflect high language variation, richness, and complex mapping of resources utilized to connect sentences.