Oye, oye! The Spanish Discourse Marker Oye and its German Equivalents

Abstract

Studies on discourse markers have been steadily increasing, and the interest in their scientific field has not waned over the years. This article proposes an interdisciplinary approach that encompasses the functional analysis of selected discourse markers in fictional dialogues in Spanish and German, together with their equivalents in official translations. Accordingly, this study is situated within the framework of pragmatic-descriptive and translation studies. First, we attempt to offer a detailed description of the functions and discursive positions of the marker oye and its variants. Secondly, we seek to identify their translations and, thus, their prototypical bidirectional equivalents. As a basis for our research, we have analysed examples of oye in its function as a discourse marker based on occurrences identified in the Parallel Corpus German/Spanish (PaGeS).  Subsequently, our objective was to determine whether and in what way this marker had been rendered into German. This study is presented as an innovative contribution, since there are few studies of discourse markers in the context of the represented orality in written literary discourse, above all in terms of translation regarding the language pair Spanish-German. This contribution is expected to benefit students, linguists, language teachers, translators, and all those who work with the language daily.