Translating signs of vagueness based on pragmalinguistic analysis

Difficulties and proposals for equivalences of 'comme ça' in Spanish and 'o (algo) así' in French

Abstract

In this paper we aim to reflect on the translation of the signs of vagueness comme ça from French into Spanish and o (algo) así from Spanish into French. Although these units have certain points in common, it can by no means be said that they are equivalent. Therefore, they cannot be translated by each other, or at least not systematically. Nor can they be translated literally - strictly word for word - or at least not in all contexts of use. In the absence of contrastive and translatological studies dealing with these sequences, we rely on the research carried out by Béguelin and Corminboeuf (2017), Corminboeuf (2017), Gómez Seibane (2018) and Sánchez Jiménez (2018, 2020) to, first of all, carry out a pragmalinguistic analysis of samples taken from the CREA, MEsA, CFPP2000, OFROM and Frantext corpora. The theoretical framework on which this analysis is based is the model of Pragmatic Linguistics proposed by Fuentes Rodríguez (2017 [2000]). In a second stage, we review in detail the translation equivalences offered in about twenty bilingual dictionaries (paper and online) and nine machine translators guided by Artificial Intelligence, which allows us to note that their treatment has important shortcomings. Finally, we propose a series of translation equivalences that take into account the diversity of discursive functions of these terms of vagueness in order to restore as faithfully as possible their different semantic-pragmatic values.