Abstract
Based on Cognitive Linguistics, we investigate the use of motion verbs in English and Brazilian Portuguese basketball broadcasts and its implications for translation. This corpus, which represents a natural context of spoken language, included two National Basketball Association games. We found a total of 104 motion verb occurrences, 51 in English and 53 in Brazilian Portuguese, consisting of 46 different types in English and 26 in Brazilian Portuguese. This suggests that the broadcasts are somewhat equivalent in style, since a similar number of verbs were used in both languages. However, the variety of motion verbs and their meaning were asymmetrical. A wider variety of motion verbs is used in English than in Brazilian Portuguese. Moreover, in English, there is a tendency to use verbs that encode MANNER in the verb root. In Brazilian Portuguese, on the other hand, the preferred verbs are less specific, encode PATH and provide less information about the manner of motion. Such differences are the source of the difficulties for translating motion verbs from English to Portuguese. For translation studies, this study corroborates the Unique Items Hypothesis, according to which an item is unique in a given language inasmuch as its grammatical contexts are unique in that language.
Keywords
Translation; Verbs; Motion; Typology
