Investigating interlanguage in present perfect acquisition through translation

The paper uses the blind translation into English of a youth reader originally written in Portuguese by two Brazilian college students with different proficiency levels – one upper-intermediate, who has never lived in an English-speaking country though visits her mother in the US often, and the other one advanced, who lived in the US with his family from the age 4 to the age 14 – to verify if Selinker’s (1972; 2013, elsewhere) interlanguage hypothesis holds as far as the use of the present perfect goes. The two outcomes are contrasted with the translation of the reader by a Portuguese/English bilingual native speaker. The methodology for the case-study at hand is a quantitative-qualitative analysis of the data we gathered: Taking into consideration not only the number of tokens each of the three translations includes but also the typological nuances the verb tense encompasses in the three outputs, the investigation yields as a result an inference that can be drawn from our here observed continuum upper-intermediate student > advanced student > bilingual speaker for the use of the present perfect, as far as how the verb tense interacts with Selinker`s interlanguage hypothesis, namely, that subsequent surveys shall yield similar conclusions. After all, the 3 participants involved are correspondingly high-performance informants, which renders the current case study outstandingly representative. We deployed Comrie (1976) and McCawley (1971) as benchmark for the shades of meaning the present perfect in English may convey.