On the lower frequency of occurrence of Spanish verbal periphrases in translated texts as evidence for the unique items hypothesis

This paper presents the results of a study on the frequencies of occurrence of Spanish verbal periphrases in Spanish original texts and Spanish translations from English. Tirkkonen-Condit (2004) found that certain typical elements of Finnish were not as frequent in texts translated from English into Finnish as in original Finnish texts, and suggested this could be a translation universal, the Unique Items Hypothesis.

Our aim was to find out whether this under-representation of unique items in translation is also observed in translations from English into Spanish. A set of 27 verbal periphrases (e.g. soler + infinitive) was selected for this purpose and a comparable corpus of contemporary literary texts — composed of Spanish original texts and texts translated from English into Spanish — was built in order to compare the frequency of occurrence of the Spanish verbal periphrases in both subcorpora.

The results of this study lend support to the conclusions of previous research conducted on the subject. Our analysis showed that more than half of these 27 periphrastic constructions show a lower frequency in translated texts than in non-translated texts and that in some cases their syntactic or collocational behavior in translated text differs from their use in non-translations.