Pronouns also Used as Terms: a Contextual Analysis of the Pronouns yo and ello in Psychoanalysis Articles in Portuguese-Spanish Translation

Psychoanalysis is a field in which articles on a wide variety of topics abound and in which general lexical items are used as terms, thus hindering both the recognition of terms and their translation. Moreover, the same lexical unit can be used throughout a text both with terminological and plain-language meanings, and the line between them is rather blurred. In the present paper, we analyze two lexical units in Spanish that can be used as terms and as words - yo and ello - and their respective equivalents in Portuguese: id and ego or eu and isso. A corpus-based study was carried out for the contextualized analysis of these two lexical units, using the theoretical background of corpus linguistics, the functionalistic approach to translation, and the Communicative Theory of Terminology.