Translating Motion, Manner and Path combinations
It is characteristic of everyday colloquial English, and of a number of other languages, to express Path by particles (+ preposition) and to combine Manner with Motion in the verb.
This is not so in the Romance languages, however. Spanish and French, for instance, have a different pattern. Let us take the sentence Paul ran back up into the attic. Spanish can combine Motion in the lexical verb with just one of the above components, either Manner alone (corrió = ran), or just one of the Path notions (subir = go up; entrar = go in, volver = go back, followed by a participle expressing Manner). The literal equivalents of these are not idiomatic English and should be avoided:
Pablo corrió al ático. (‘Paul ran to the attic’)
Pablo volvió al ático corriendo. (‘Paul went back to the attic running’)
Pablo subió al ático corriendo. (‘Paul went up to the attic running’)
Pablo entró en el ático corriendo. (‘Paul went into the attic running’)
To attempt to put in more would be awkward and stylistically unacceptable; even these versions are unnatural. For this reason, translators working from English to Spanish are obliged to under-translate, usually omitting Path or Manner meanings. Conversely, in translations from Spanish into English over-translation is common through the addition of Path or Manner meanings. In both cases the aim is to provide a natural text in the target language.
English phrasal and prepositional verbs often require to be translated into other languages by transposing the meanings of the verb and particle in the target language. For example, row across the lake can be translated into Spanish as cruzar el lago remando [literally cross the lake rowing]. The English particle across is translated as the main verb, cruzar, while the verb row is translated as a participle, remando. This process has been called cross transposition. In this case the transposition was complete, since both verb and adverb were translated. In other cases, either the verb or the particle is better not expressed, being inferred, as in: A bird flew in: Entró un pájaro. The transposition is then ‘incomplete’ since the notion of flying has been omitted as not salient.
