Translating Beauty: Aesthetic Adjectives from French and English into Spanish in the Open Parallel Corpus

This talk presents results from a corpus study on how the French aesthetic adjectives beau and joli, and the English beautiful and pretty, are translated into Spanish as bello, bonito, hermoso and lindo, and what factors influence the choice of equivalent. The study is based on 40,834 translated sentences from the Open Parallel Corpus, accessible through Sketch Engine (Kilgarriff et al., 2014). Modal equivalents were identified for each source adjective and used as reference for the rest of the study, specifically to measure the weight of three factors on modal deviation and target adjective choice: semantic noun kind, grammatical and referential gender, and degree of aesthetic evaluation, i.e. intensification. Corpus processing and analysis were conducted on Python, using mainly the spaCy library (Montani et al., 2023); for statistical tests, the SciPy library (Virtanen et al., 2020) was used. Results show that target adjective choice is affected by semantic kind, specifically humanness; by grammatical and referential gender, notably in cases of gender mismatch in the French sub-corpus; and by the addition or elimination of intensifiers. Conversely, the treatment of intensification (mainly addition and elimination) is itself affected by gender mismatch, semantic kind and modal deviation. Where possible, these results are considered alongside the sparse previous research on aesthetic evaluation in Spanish (Ariza Viguera, 2007; Curbeira Cancela & Urra Vargas, 2012; De Waele, 2014; Gladkova & Romero-Trillo, 2014; Wong García, 2024, 2025).