Translating diminutives: a corpus-based analysis of the Gravitational Pull Hypothesis

Resumen

The use of diminutive suffixes is very common in Spanish. However, translators tend to underuse them when translating from languages in which diminutives are scarcer or less used. In this paper, we seek to identify this underuse in literary texts translated from English and French into European Spanish, by focusing on the morphological aspects of diminution, but also adopting a semantic approach. To this end, the theoretical framework proposed by Halverson’s Gravitational Pull Hypothesis (GPH; 2003, 2010, 2017) was employed. Drawing on cognitive linguistics and bilingualism research, the GPH constitutes an attempt to account for different hypotheses about translated language. The reason for selecting diminutives is that diminutive suffixes in English-Spanish and French-Spanish language pairs may be regarded as unique items (Tirkkonen-Condit 2004), that is, target language items that are specific to a particular language and without a direct counterpart in the source language. In English and French, diminutiveness is mainly expressed through semantic diminutives, e.g, ‘adjective + noun’ analytic forms, with diminutive suffixes infrequently used. To carry out the analysis, COVALT parallel and comparable corpus was used. Whereappropriate, the results were subjected to the log-likelihood test for statistical significance and the Unidirectional Translation Correspondence testing (Marco 2021), which is a formula for operationalising the degree of connectivity between items across the two components of a parallel corpus. Our findings show that Spanish diminutive suffixes were underrepresented in translations compared to non-translated texts, whereas semantic diminutives were overrepresented.