Spanish anger words in translation

Abstract

This paper examines the category of anger words in Spanish texts translated from German, compared to original Spanish literary texts. Drawing on

Gravitational Pull Hypothesis (GPH) it predicts the overuse or underuse of specific anger words in the translated texts and evaluates these predictions using the PaGeS corpus. The findings confirm that the salience of source and target language items, as well as the connectivity between them, are reliable predictors of tendencies in translations. Specifically, the word families of ira, furia, enojo , and indignación are overrepresented in the translated texts, while rabia, cólera, cabreo, molestia, fastidio , and disgust are underrepresented. The study further identifies word class as an additional conditioning factor, suggesting that the principles of the GPH operate both on the semantic and the structural level.