The discourse markers indeed, in fact, really and actually and their Spanish equivalents in economy

Abstract

This article explores the translation procedures followed in the rendering of the adverbials indeed, in fact, really and actually in a parallel corpus of English texts and their Spanish counterparts in the field of economy. While the adverbials mentioned are all categorized as boosters according to Hyland’s classification of metadiscourse markers (2005) in the source corpus, their Spanish correspondents may fall within other such metadiscourse categories as attitude and hedging markers, for example. The study of these variants contributes to our understanding of the processes involved in the translation of these markers, which seem to correspond to an intention of the translators to provide adequate translated versions so that these texts read as naturally in the target language as possible. Our methodology of inquiry involves corpus linguistics tools in order to interrogate a parallel corpus and retrieve cases of the adverbials indeed, in fact, really and actually. Our approach to discourse markers includes Schiffrin (1987), Fraser (1996), Jucker & Ziv (1998), Aijmer (2002), and especially Buysse (2012), Ghezzi (2014), Carrió-Pastor (2016a, 2016b), and Furkó (2020). Our notion of metadiscourse follows Hyland (2005) from where we have also taken the taxonomy of metadiscourse markers used in the analysis of data to classify findings. The identification and the classification of the translation procedures rely on Cruz-García (2014). Conclusions report on the most frequent translations procedures and the commonest Spanish forms used to translate the adverbial analysed, including their metadiscourse functions.

Keywords

• discourse markers
• contrastive analysis
• translation
• metadiscourse