The use of discourse markers for indicating various types of conversational moves is very common in dialog although quite rare in expository text. The basic problem they present to translators, human or automated, is that any given marker has numerous possible translations and that these translations do not appear to be based on a semantic analysis of the expressions used but rather on a pragmatic analysis.
For instance, in the dialogs collected at NMSU, the translation of:
¿qué tal?literally:
what such?was:
what's up?No doubt there are other possibilities as well. The translation of:
how are you?
what's going on?
oyeliterally:
listenwas:
listenIn some cases, it was not translated at all.
look
hey
All the translations above are semantically quite different from each other and, for the most part, semantically different from the source language expression. However, they are similar in their discourse function, as a conversation opener in the first case, as a focusing request in the second.
A more informative example, however, concern a self-interruption. The speaker, C2, has just stated that he is busy all morning and then follows on with:
Bueno, no ... (6, 10, C2)which is translated as:
Well, noActually, this translation is not especially appropriate given that the speaker is going to contradict what himself. A more adequate translation might have been:
Hold on, that's not right ...since this marks both the interruption of the discourse and the self contradiction more explicitly. The key point, however, is that the selection of a target language equivalent is based on the conversational function of the discourse marker.
Procedurally, then, the translation of discourse markers involves: (1) identifying the conversational function they are being used to mark and (2) selecting an appropriate equivalent in the target language given that function. (1) entails a type of analysis, that is, of conversational function, that is simply not very useful for expository text nor for its translation, since it is, at best, an entirely one sided conversation. The author does all of the talking and there is no specific addressee. Such actions as greeting, opening a conversation, leave-taking, pre-announcing, confirming, accepting, rejecting, etc. are not relevant to single party linguistic discourse. (2) also is problematical. It requires some set of target language stylistic constraints for selecting among the different expressions for a particular function.