Chapter 4. “ Ich bekomme es erklärt ”

Abstract

Spanish lacks a construction that parallels the German dative passive, which presents the process from the recipient perspective while often leaving the agent implicit. The main aim of this chapter is to elucidate as to what extent the recipient perspective is maintained, and which voice resources ( genus verbi ) and translation techniques are involved in the translation of German passive constructions between German and Spanish. The evidence for the study is taken from the Parallel Corpus of German and Spanish (PaGeS). When translating sentences which include the bekommen/kriegen variants of the dative passive, translators into Spanish do not maintain the recipient perspective, but opt for, mainly, the agent perspective in about 40% of the examples under scrutiny. In these cases, simplification comes into play as a translation technique.