A corpus-based analysis of English affixal
negation translated into Spanish*
Rosa Rabadán and Marlén Izquierdo
University of León, SpainThis paper reports on a corpus-based analysis of how English affixal negation is
translated into Spanish and the extent to which the use and distribution of the
translations differ from those in non-translated Spanish texts. Empirical data for
the study are drawn from the ACTRES Parallel Corpus (P-ACTRES http://actres.
unileon.es/) and from the Corpus de Referencia del Español Actual (CREA). The
cross-linguistic analysis reveals a fairly large and varied inventory of Spanish
trans lation choices which are then compared with non-translated CREA data. The
contrastive procedure includes a verification of target language fit which reveals
that differences in translated and non-translated usage are statistically significant.
These differences are interpreted qualitatively in terms of translation universals.Keywords: affixal negation, English-Spanish cross-linguistic analysis,
P-ACTRES corpus- Introduction
This paper describes a corpus-based analysis of the distribution of affixal negation
in English and Spanish, based on an initial hypothesis that the apparent corre-
spondence between the majority of negative affixes may not actually match their
distribution and use in the two languages. Whether this is the case is tested by
means of a double contrastive procedure involving original English texts, their
translations into Spanish, and the use of affixal negation in Spanish originals. The
study aims to determine how English affixal negation is translated into Spanish
and to examine whether the translations match the use and distribution of the
same forms in original non-translated Spanish.
- Research for this article has been undertaken as part of the ACTRES program, funded by
the regional government of Castilla y León, Spain [LE025A09], and by the Spanish Ministry of
Science and Innovation and ERDF [FFI 2009-08548].