An analysis of the concession relation based on the discourse marker aunque in a Spanish-Chinese parallel corpus

Abstract

The translation between Spanish and Chinese is particularly complicated because of the extensive grammatical, syntactic and discursive differences between the two languages. In this paper, based on the discourse marker in Spanish aunque (“although” in English), which usually signals the Concession relation, we will compare the discourse structure of Spanish and Chinese in the parallel corpus United Nations Corpus (UN). In order to perform the comparison, we will use the theoretical framework of Rhetorical Structure Theory (RST) by Mann and Thompson (1988).La traducción español-chino es especialmente complicada debido a las grandes diferencias gramaticales, sintácticas y discursivas entre ambas lenguas. En este trabajo, comparamos las estructuras discursivas del español y el chino en el corpus paralelo United Nations Corpus (UN), partiendo del marcador discursivo en español aunque, que señala la relación de Concesión. Para realizar la comparación empleamos el marco teórico de la Rhetorical Structure Theory (RST) de Mann y Thompson (1988).