Politeness in Translation between English and Spanish

If we accept Brown and Levinson’s distinction between positive and negative politeness, it would seem justifiable to accept also that Britain tends to be a negative-politeness society whereas Spain tends towards positive politeness. The paper asks how positive-politeness readers (Spaniards) react to examples of negative (or English) politeness when translated literally. It reports on a small-scale experiment carried out to see how such readers reacted to translations from English of samples of negative politeness and poses the question whether translators (continue to) translate the locutionary dimension (the words) of such texts rather than attempt to convey the illocutionary force (the acts of politeness being performed).