Translating Epistemic Adverbs from English into Spanish: Evidence from a Parallel Corpus1
Bibliographic record
Abstract
The expression of modal meanings is an area of great complexity in the relationship between form and function in a single language and cross-linguistically. Modal adverbs in particular are considered to be problematic from a contrastive perspective due to their multifunctionality in English (Aijmer 2005). This paper is a corpus-based study of the expression of epistemic possibility by means of three common modal adverbs in English (certainly, probably, possibly) and the translational options chosen in Spanish for expressing those meanings. The aim is to identify trends in the translations of these epistemic adverbs that contribute to a better understanding of the various semantic functions that native speakers attribute to these units. The analysis shows that the omission of modal adverbs in the translations may be considered as an indicator of the degree of grammaticalization attained by these adverbs in English. The results provide useful information not only in the field of translator training and practice, but also in descriptive linguistics.
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How this classification was reachedexpand
Full frame machine prediction
Teacher imitationNot calibrated prevalence, not ground truth. Human validation pending. The Gemma side is a direct model label for every work in the frame, read from the title-only record. The Codex side is a classifier learned from the 10,348 direct Codex labels and calibrated to design-weighted sample rates; fields without enough sample support carry no Codex call. Candidate is the union of the two sides; consensus is their intersection. These outputs are machine_predicted_unvalidated and are not human labels.
Distilled classifier scores by category (both heads)
| Category | Codex | Gemma |
|---|---|---|
| Metaresearch | 0.004 | 0.017 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.001 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.001 | 0.000 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.002 | 0.003 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.002 | 0.002 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.002 | 0.002 |
| Open science | 0.001 | 0.003 |
| Research integrity | 0.001 | 0.001 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.004 | 0.001 |
Machine scores (provisional)
The two teacher heads of the student model, read on this work. A score orders the frame for review; it never asserts a category, and the validation status ships verbatim with every row.
Baseline scores from an immature model (maturity gate not passed, 7 training rounds). Scores rank; they never assert a category.
score_only:v0-immature-baseline · verbatim from the scoring run: score_only means the number may rank works, and no category label ships from itClassification
machine, unvalidatedMachine predicted; a candidate call from one source (direct Gemma or distilled Codex), not a consensus.
How this classification was reached, model by model and score by score, is at the end of the page under "How this classification was reached".