Position shifts in Spanish translations of Charles Darwin’s on the Origin of species by natural selection

Abstract

Previous studies (Brisset, 2002; Vandepitte et al., 2011) have compared the amount of certainty expressed in Charles Darwin’s On the Origin of Species with that expressed in translations of the work. This thesis adds Spanish translations to this line of investigation, analyzing the 1877 translation by God´ınez and the 1921 translation by Zulueta of On the Origin of Species. Focusing on the translation of utterances that contain certain modal expressions, I find that the translation by God´ınez (1877) exhibits significantly more certainty than the source text, whereas that of Zulueta (1921) shows no such shift.