Explicitación de la fase inicial mediante perífrasis verbalesestudio descriptivo de traducciones del alemán al español en traducciones profesionales y estudiantiles

Abstract

The aim of this paper is to investigate in which circumstances what seems to be a discourse convention of the Spanish language (i.e., frequently stressing the ingressive phase of the situation in narrative sequences) takes also place in the translation process from German into Spanish, particularly when the verbal periphrases empezar / comenzar a + infinitive are involved. To this end, after briefly checking the literature on Spanish inchoative verbal periphrases, the data of two parallel corpora of narrative sequences of literary texts are analyzed -the first one containing translations by professional translators, and the second one including student translations. The results show that stressing the ingressive phase by means of empezar / comenzar a + infinitive in translation from German into Spanish occurs frequently in narrative sequences which feature very particular narrative schemes. These findings are then interpreted in the light of the hypothesized general tendencies in translation.