Corpus-based functionality and translatability

Abstract

This paper reports on a descriptive study of English and Spanish progressive constructions to identify degrees of common functionality and, therefore, translatability. Here, the functionality of the resource under study is examined contrastively, in order to observe functional correspondences which can be considered translation equivalents. In addition, a descriptive study of actual translations provides a broader picture of the degree of translatability between the languages under investigation. To this end, a corpus-based approach has been adopted to account for language usage in a cross-linguistic setting. Two complementary types of corpora have been used, a comparable corpus made up of BoE and CREA, and the ACTRES Parallel Corpus. The result constitutes a comprehensive approach to language description oriented towards application.