Participants ‘você’ and ‘you’ in translation.

Abstract

This paper analyses participants ‘você’ and ‘you’ in the short story ‘Days of wine and roses’ (‘Dias de vinho e rosas’), originally written in Brazilian Portuguese by Silviano Santiago, and its translation into English by a student translator. It aims to investigate some features of the linguistic systems involved from the perspective of the experiential component of the ideational metafunction (Halliday & Matthiessen, 2004). The participants were annotated and their tags were used on AntConc to obtain data quantification. Results show that these participants are realised in five types of ideational clauses, being the material, mental, and verbal clauses the more frequent ones. It is concluded that these participants are realised more often functioning as Logical Subjects with respect to the various ideational meanings, which points to their configuration as doers of action.