78 Rosa Rabadán and Marlén Izquierdo
threshold. Calculations for two-tailed p-value yielded < 0.001, which indicates that
the frequency of use is markedly different. Table 17 shows the statistical informa-
tion obtained after having calculated z for each negative resource analysed, with
the exception of paraphrasing, omission (Ø), borrowing and non-translation. In the
case of paraphrasing, the lack of regularity prevents isolating any representative
sample of this negative resource in CREA. Similarly, CREA searches for zero items
(omission) are not possible. CREA results for the unique case of borrowing found
in this study cannot be considered representative.Table 17. Verifying target language fit: translations of English
negative affixes into Spanish
Translation types P-ACTRES CREA Z Significance
Affixal neg 2,655 5,388 211.6438 Overuse
Lexical neg 491 3,409 50.4107 Overuse
Prep P 354 445 89.5545 Overuse
Paraphrasing 262 – – –
Clausal neg 241 103,403 −50.1531 Underuse
No + (pos) lexical item 210 134,027 −67.1301 Underuse
Omission Ø 166 – – –
Quantifier/degree 135 243 49.0953 Overuse
Non-translation 4 – – –
Borrowing 1 2 – –
Total 4,619 246,917Positive figures for z indicate significant overuse of a particular resource in trans-
lated Spanish, whereas negative figures mark significant underuse as compared
with native non-translated Spanish. All tested types show that translated usage
deviates from non-translated behaviour. While these results were corroborated
by means of a different statistical package, they are necessarily tentative. In order
to validate the findings, replication of the tests using other corpora is required.- Conclusions
Our empirical data show clear differences between translated Spanish and regu-
lar native usage. These differences manifest themselves in translated language as
overuse or underuse of a given resource, or as less efficient solutions, such as
paraphrasing or omission.
Possible explanatory hypotheses for this behaviour can be formulated in terms
of translation universals (Chesterman 2004, Tirkkonen-Condit 2002 and 2004,