Translation of Portuguese Discourse Markers to German: ‘na verdade’, what is gained and what is lost?

• Autor(a) principal: Carapinha, Conceiçao
• Data de Publicação: 2019
• Outros Autores: Plag, Cornelia Elisabeth
• Tipo de documento: Artigo
• Idioma: por
• Título da fonte: Repositório Científico de Acesso Aberto de Portugal (Repositórios Cientìficos)
• Texto Completo: https://ojs.letras.up.pt/index.php/re/article/view/6555

Discourse markers signal discourse coherence and become very important items in the translation process although only recently the problems raised by their translation have begun to capture the attention of researchers. This study intends to contribute to this research area by analyzing the translations of the discourse marker na verdade into German. Drawing on examples from contemporary European Portuguese, the study shows that the marker has three main functions: (i) confirmation; (ii) reformulation; and (iii) contrast. The contrastive analysis carried out in the Europarl corpus reveals that the confirmation value is the most common in this corpus and that the translators opted for a very wide range of equivalents. Although the German marker eigentlich, which scarcely appears in the corpus, could be the most appropriate equivalent to translate na verdade, another discourse marker, tatsächlich, seems to be the preferred choice of professionals, and this option raises pertinent questions in the field of Translation.