El empleo del clítico le en la traducción inglés > español de formularios de consentimiento: una aproximación desde la gramática cognitiva

Abstract

This work aims at providing empirical evidence that supports the hypothesis that thorough grammatical descriptions are necessary so as to characterize genres, on the basis of the reciprocal conditioning that exists among the different linguistic levels (Ciapuscio 2003). To this end, we study a corpus of informed consent forms translated from English into Spanish. Specifically, we claim that in consent forms the presence of the clitics la, lo and le, which refer to a second singular person and which are the translation of you, with exophoric reference, is due to the dialogic nature of the textual segments in which they appear more frequently. In addition, we focus on the clitic le, in particular, which tends to be favored as a DO instead of lo when the referent is either a male or a female person. The pronoun le, with no grammatical gender marking, like you in the original, allows, in turn, the profiling (Langacker 2002) of an entity of a higher level of relative activity (Aijón Oliva 2005) and a lower degree affectedness (Martínez 2010) than the instances in which lo is employed. The results of this study could contribute to the translation of informed consent forms from English into Spanish.