Ser, estar, ficar, haver e ter contra ha, bli
e være: quem disse que era fácil descrever
sentimentos e sensações?
(Ser, estar, ficar, haver and ter against ha, bli and
være: who said it was easy to describe feelings and
sensations? working title)
Diana Santos
ILOS
1
Why this case study
In this paper I will use PoNTE [9], a small parallel corpus that includes
Norwegian and Portuguese original texts and their multiple translations (by
mainly Norwegian native speakers) into the other language, to show (some
of) the complexity involved in the use of these verbs, roughly translatable
by be and have in English.
By analyzing the (not always perfect) solutions the translators came
up with and the quantitative distribution of the cases in the texts, I hope
to shed some light on the complexity of the use of these verbs in the two
languages, while demonstrating the usefulness of such a procedure for both
Portuguese and Norwegian speakers who are learning the other language.
Very briefly, the (monolingual) situation in the two languages is as
follows:
The triple ser, estar and ficar is essential in Portuguese [1, 6], representing in turn an essential property, an accessory or temporary property, and
a result (of a change of state). These three verbs are also used as passive
auxiliaries, and for locating expressions (in space and in time, with some
idiosyncrasies in both domains). Haver is used for impersonal existential
expressions, and is being replaced by ter in Brazilian Portuguese. Ter, in
1
addition to be employed for possession and inalienable parts, is used in many contexts where Germanic languages would have be or være, namely when
describing sensations or feelings: ter fome, ter medo, ter frio (be hungry, be
afraid, feel cold). Finally, ser (and only ser) is used in cleft constructions
and identity constructions, and is (also therefore) by far the most frequent
of these verbs in Portuguese.
As for Norwegian [3, 2, 4, 5] være, bli and ha, the two first are used for
passive, and their distinction can be partially described as either focusing
on the action or on the result. (Or, alternatively, være describes a durative
situation while bli focuses on the instant of a change of state). In temporal
description, bli is used for referring to future events, while both være and bli
kan be used in the past. Ha seems to be similar to English have, and therefore quite different from Portuguese ter. Finally, spatial location is almost
never rendered by these verbs, contrary to Portuguese, since Norwegian (as
a typical Germanic language) has many verbs for that particular semantic
field.
The paper will show that having a (multitarget) parallel corpus (compiled for other purposes, namely for giving students opportunity to reflect
over their linguistic competence and translation creativity) enables one to
investigate whether any of differences listed above poses difficulties to nonnative speakers, and also whether interesting patterns can be formulated by
observing translation practice.
Multiple translations are an asset because they give us teachers a probe
to what is difficult, what is easy, and to what constitute common errors that
we have to eradicate [7, 11]. In pairs such as Norwegian and Portuguese,
with very little contrastive material available, we cannot base us in works
such as Vinay and Darbelnet’s coherent presentation of the spirit of two
languages [12]. At most we can rely on a fair amount of contrastive material
between English and Norwegian on one side, and English and Portuguese
on the other, but this can be an unfortunate triangle whenever, as is the
case of være/bli and ser/estar/ficar, both languages are richer and more
complex than English. Going through English is therefore methologically
unadvisable, as is clearly the case when one is interested in preposition use,
see [8].
2
Planned structure
The paper is planned as follows:
1. Describing PoNTE’s contents and rationale
2
2. Presenting interesting examples of the translation in this field
3. Presenting the quantitative data extracted
4. Commenting on the results
Referanser
[1] Jarle Ebeling. Presentative constructions in English and Norwegian: A
corpus-based contrastive study. PhD thesis, Faculty of Arts, University
of Oslo, 2000.
[2] Signe Oksefjell Ebeling. The Norwegian verbs bli and få and their correspondences in English: A corpus-based contrastive study. PhD thesis,
Faculty of Arts, University of Oslo, 2003.
[3] Jan Engh. Om den grammatiske kategorien ’futurum’, 1976. Norsk
leksikografisk institutt, Universitetet i Oslo,.
[4] Jan Terje Faarlund, Svein Lie, and Kjell Ivar Vannebo. Norsk Referansegrammatikk. Universitetsforlag, 1997.
[5] Belinda Maia. A Contribution to the Study of the language of Emotion
in English and Portuguese. PhD thesis, Faculdade de de Letras da
Universidade do Porto, Porto, 1994.
[6] Kirsten Malmkjaer. Who walked in the emperor’s garden: The translation of pronouns in Hans Christian Andersen’s introductory passages.
In Gunilla Anderman and C. Banér, editors, Proceedings of the Tenth
Biennial Conference of the British Association of Scandinavian Studies.
The University of Surrey, Department of Linguistics and International
Studies, 1996.
[7] Diana Santos. Med e com: um estudo contrastivo português - norueguês.
Romansk Forum, 16(2):1029–1042, Agosto 2002. Actas do XV congresso
dos romanistas escandinavos (Romanist’2002).
[8] Diana Santos. Os possessivos estão-me a complicar o ensino :-). In
textos escolhidos, APL 2012, 26 de Outubro 2012.
[9] Diana Santos. The next step for the translation network. In Diana
Santos, Krister Lindén, and Wanjiku Nganga, editors, Shall We Play
the Festschrift Game? Essays on the Occasion of Lauri Carlson, pages
49–62. Springer, 2012.
3
[10] Diana Santos. Translation. In Robert Binnick, editor, The Oxford
Handbook of Tense and Aspect, pages 335–369. Oxford University Press,
2012.
[11] Diana Maria de Sousa Marques Pinto dos Santos. Tense and aspect
in English and Portuguese: a contrastive semantical study. PhD thesis,
Instituto Superior Técnico, Universidade Técnica de Lisboa, 1996. Tese
de Doutoramento.
[12] J.-P. Vinay and J. Darbelnet. Stylistique Comparée du Français et de
l’Anglais: Méthode de traduction. Nouvelle édition révue et corrigée,
Paris: Didier, 1.a edição: 1958 edition, 1997.
4