Talmy's (e.g., 1985Talmy's (e.g., , 2000 seminal work has engendered a great deal of research and debate in the literature on motion event descriptions over the last decades. Despite the vast amount of research on the linguistic expression of motion events, the fact that motion verb roots might encode information apart from Path and Manner of motion is often overlooked. The present paper addresses the semantics of 376 English and 257 Spanish motion verbs by exploring the general conflations which are conveyed by these verbs. In this regard, both crosslinguistic similarities and differences will be pointed out. My research concludes that path-conflating and manner-conflating verbs amount to the largest part of their lexicons but that other minor patterns such as ground conflations, in contradiction to Talmy's speculations on the lack of ground-conflating verbs, are present as well. Taken as a whole, this paper provides a rich and detailed account on the semantic nature of the English and the Spanish motion verb lexicons, and emerges as a helpful reference for researchers in this field.
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-of-motion 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.
Over this last decade translation process research has provided evidence for the importance of studying translators and interpreters’ individual differences so as to gain a better understanding of the cognitive processes involved in translation and the potential impact of the translator’s personality and emotions on translation performance. Drawing on previous research on the impact of self-esteem and creativity on translation, the present paper describes an experiment to measure the effect of self-esteem and creative intelligence on the written translation performance of a sample of 44 Spanish professional translators. The results reveal that (a) the more creative translators are, the more creative translations they produce; and (b) the higher translators’ self-esteem is, the lower the scores for accuracy.
scite is a Brooklyn-based organization that helps researchers better discover and understand research articles through Smart Citations–citations that display the context of the citation and describe whether the article provides supporting or contrasting evidence. scite is used by students and researchers from around the world and is funded in part by the National Science Foundation and the National Institute on Drug Abuse of the National Institutes of Health.
customersupport@researchsolutions.com
10624 S. Eastern Ave., Ste. A-614
Henderson, NV 89052, USA
This site is protected by reCAPTCHA and the Google Privacy Policy and Terms of Service apply.
Copyright © 2025 scite LLC. All rights reserved.
Made with 💙 for researchers
Part of the Research Solutions Family.