THE SEMANTIC ROLE OF CONDITIONALS IN ENGLISH AND SPANISH: THEIR RELEVANCE IN THE FIELD OF TRANSLATION.

La Traducción: Hacia un encuentro de lenguas y culturas

Comunicarte

Lugar: Córdoba Capital; Año: 2008; p. 303 - 313

Any language can be interpreted as a system of meanings with corresponding grammatical forms to realize those meanings. In the case of conditional meaning, English structures are highly strung (Halliday, 985, xxiv) and complicated. A good handling of English conditionals involves proper knowledge of embedding, proficient command of tense forms to mark appropriate potential subsequence of certain, possible or impossible events and a good grasp of modal auxiliaries? uses. Celce Murcia and Larsen Freeman (1999) argue that the semantics of all the various types o conditional clauses are subtle and hard to understand even for native speakers (p. 547). In spite of semantic-grammatical complexities, conditionals are vastly used in communication and serve a wide variety of socially-related language functions. Hence, they are worthy of analytic and pedagogic attention. The following discussion focuses on the semantic relationships underlying the grammatical realization of conditionals in English and Spanish as a way to bring about crosslinguistic insights that can hopefully result in enlightening the work of the translator. This study will (i) explore the expression of conditionality in the two languages, (ii) discuss the benefits that such comparative analysis plays in consciousness raising (James, 1998:13) and finally, it will (iii) focus on their relevance when translating a text from English into Spanish and viceversa.