Translating Multifunctional Stance Adverbs: A Corpus-Based Study of the Spanish Translations of Certainly.

Abstract

This paper presents a corpus-based analysis of the translations of the espistemic adverb certainly into Spanish as found in the English-Spanish parallel corpus P-ACTRES 1.0. From a cross-linguistic perspective, certainly may pose difficulties in translation derived from its status as a multifunctional unit. The aim of this study is to analyse the distribution of the translational options of certainly according to their discourse functions, which, in turn, shed light on the multiple senses developed by the adverb. Thus the findings of the descriptive translation study become a “valuable complement” for the analysis of monolingual data (Noël 2003; SimonVanderbergen and Aijmer 2007: 83). The results, which might find applications in the field of translation training and practice, have confirmed the multifunctionality of certainly and revealed associations between its various discourse functions in the source text and the distribution of translational options in Spanish.