Typological studies on the linguistic expression of motion are certainly of interest to translation scholars. The study of how motion is expressed across languages has indeed revealed some striking typological differences (e.g., Talmy 1985, 1991, 2000; Berman and Slobin 1994; Stromqvist and Verhoeven 2004), which can account for some of the strategies translators resort to when dealing with motion expressions (Slobin 1996; Ibarretxe-Antuñano 2003; Cifuentes-Férez 2006, 2013; Ibarretxe-Antuñano and Filipović 2013). However, the question still remains as to whether translators’ decisions are exclusively guided by such typological differences or whether there are other experience- or task-related factors that may explain their behaviour. This paper provides empirical evidence on the type of factors that guide translators’ decisions when translating manner-ofmotion verbs, exploring the impact of different types of texts and the translator’s level of expertise. For this purpose, a pilot think-aloud protocol is implemented in order to examine the translation process of ten Spanish translators (five professionals and five graduate students without professional experience) when transferring manner-of-motion verbs from English into Spanish. Our results reveal that the way translators deal with manner information is mainly influenced by typological differences between the two languages. But differences in the translators’ level of professional expertise and in task-related constraints (e.g., the degree in which different type of texts focus on motion verbs) also have an effect on the strategies that translators choose to convey manner information.
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Cifuentes-Férez, Paula. 2006. La Expresión de los Dominios de Movimiento y Visión en Inglés y en Español desde la Perspectiva de la Lingüística Cognitiva. Unpublished M.A. thesis Universidad de Murcia.
Cifuentes-Férez, Paula. 2009. A Crosslinguistic Study on the Semantics of Motion Verbs in English and Spanish. Munich: LINCOM.
Cifuentes-Férez, Paula. 2013. “El Tratamiento de los Verbos de Manera de Movimiento y de los Caminos en la Traducción Inglés-Español de Textos Narrativos.” Miscelánea 471: 53–80.
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Ibarretxe-Antuñano, Iraide. 2003. “What Translation Tells Us about Motion: A Contrastive Study of Typologically Different Languages.” International Journal of English Studies 3 (2): 151–176.
Ibarretxe-Antuñano, Iraide. 2009. “Path Salience in Motion Events.” In Crosslinguistic Approaches to the Psychology of Language: Research in the Tradition of Dan Isaac Slobin, ed. by Elena Lieven, Susan Ervin-Tripp, Jiansheng Guo, Nancy Budwig, Keiko Nakamura, and Șeyda Őzçalişkan, 403–414. New York: Psychology Press.
Ibarretxe-Antuñano, Iraide. Forthcoming. “Linguistic Typology in Motion Events: Path and Manner.” Anuario del Seminario de Filología Vasca ‘Julio de Urquijo.’ International Journal of Basque Linguistics and Philology.
Ibarretxe-Antuñano, Iraide, and Luna Filipović. 2013. “Lexicalisation Patterns and Translation.” In Cognitive Linguistics and Translation: Advances in Some Theoretical Models and Applications, ed. by Ana Rojo and Iraide Ibarretxe-Antuñano, 251–282. Berlin: Mouton de Gruyter.
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