Translations of Representations of Moving and Saying from English into Spanish

Abstract

This paper presents a systemic-functional contrastive analysis of an original English text – a chapter, ‘The Land of Shadow’ from J. R. R. Tolkien’s The Lord of the Rings – and its Spanish translation, ‘El País de la Sombra’, focusing on the shifts in translation of representations of motion and of saying. These two realms of experience provide an interesting contrast in terms of experiential complexity, as more transitivity parameters are expected to be involved in construing human experience of motion through three-dimensional space than of speech events. From this we can predict (a) that there will be greater differences in the translation of representations of motion than in the translation of representations of saying, and (b) that the differences in the representation of motion will largely reflect the systemic differences between two languages. Our analysis demonstrates that translation shifts in the area of verbs of saying are relatively insignificant whereas the translation of representations of motion extends over the scale from no shift to considerable shift, depending on the extent to which the systems of English and Spanish differ in their modeling of the experience of motion through space and that there tend to be shifts where systemic differences necessitate such shifts.