Translation and punctuation. The comma after initial constituents in Spanish and French

Abstract

In the field of punctuation, contrastive linguistics focuses on the linguistic preferences specific to each language, a task barely begun in the French-Spanish domain. The discrepancies observed in two translations, one Spanish, the other Colombian, of Nerval's novel Sylvie show that the issue arises particularly after initial constituents in the sentence. The comparison of norms and actual usage reveals several tendencies: a fluctuating use of the comma, both in French and Spanish, after connectors; a common preference in both languages for the use of the comma after modalizers; and finally, a less frequent use of the comma in Spanish after circumstantial complements. The analysis also reveals a diatopic variation between Peninsular and Colombian Spanish. Possible factors that might explain the similarities and differences observed are discussed as hypotheses.