On the translation of boundary-crossing events: Evidence from an experiment with German and Spanish translation students

Abstract

[EN] This paper examines the translation of motion events between typologically similar and different languages, a field that has typically been explored within the framework of the Thinking-for-Translating hypothesis. We present a student-based experiment focused on the translation of boundary-crossing events (specifically, constructions of the type “manner verb + into + bounded space”) from English (a satellite-framed language) into German (a satellite-framed language) and Spanish (a verb-framed language). The aim is to investigate whether translation students correctly interpret and render both the boundary-crossing and the manner components of these events. To this end, groups of German and Spanish translation students were asked to translate a series of excerpts from English narrative texts into their respective mother tongues. The results suggest that the way students handle these phenomena is primarily influenced by the lexicalization patterns of their native language, although the specific nature of the motion event and the surrounding context also play a crucial role in some cases.