How to Convert Aspect into Time: Translation from Zapotec into Spanish

Abstract

This article explores the difficulties of translating a narrative from a language that predominantly encodes aspectual information in its verbal inflection (Zapotec) to a language that by and large encodes temporal information in its verbal inflection (Spanish). As a consequence of this, an untrained translator may produce structures that are considered anomalous in the target language (e.g. a body of sentences in the imperfect preterite tense followed by a body of sentences in the present tense, without there being any apparent reason for the change in tense). It is argued that such phenomena should not simply be put down as errors owing to the translator’s lack of competence in the target language, but that they can be seen as the result of the conflict that arises out of what each language encodes and what each language presumes.