Contacts between French and Spanish in Journalistic Discourse: Morphosyntactic Variation in «Mercurio histórico y político» during the Time of Salvador Mañer (1738-1745)

Abstract

This article studies a corpus of texts written by Salvador Mañer, who introduced in Spain one of the most important newspapers during the earliest stages of the press, Mercurio histórico y político, which he translated between 1738 and 1745 from an original that was published in French in The Hague. The aim sought consists in analyzing the scope of the influence exerted by source text morphology compared to the other factors that determine the translator’s choices for a series of grammatical contexts where the Spanish language of the time shows a variety of possibilities in usage: prepositional marking of the direct object; selection of case for the unstressed personal pronoun; duplication of the indirect object; compound relatives; and use of the article before country names. With that aim in mind, our work will rely on a group of methodological proposals which consider the relationships between originals and translated texts from the non-prescriptivist perspective of multiple potential interference types which are not confined to those resulting in anomalous or marked outcomes for the target language.