Resources

The paremias or sentences or sayings are fundamental to know the language along with the ideological and cultural loads that the speakers consider popular wisdom. The Cervantes Virtual Center has created a truly powerful paremiological collection: Spanish is the starting point for a correspondence of synonyms (of the same sayings) and equivalent sayings in a repertoire of almost 20 languages ​​(including ancient Greek and Latin) . To quote the multilingual Refranero you can use the following format:

SEVILLA MUÑOZ, J.; ZURDO RUIZ-AYÚCAR, M. I. T. [dir.] (2009): Refranero multilingüe. Madrid. Instituto Cervantes (Centro Virtual Cervantes). <http://cvc.cervantes.es/lengua/refranero/>

The multilingual Refranero contains a selection of popular Spanish paremias, mainly proverbial sayings and phrases, with correspondence in several languages ​​(German, Catalan, French, Galician, Ancient Greek, Modern Greek, English, Italian, Polish, Portuguese, Romanian, Russian and Basque).

It is a multilingual refranero unique in the world not only for this linguistic combination but also for the information provided for each Spanish paremia: its possible variants and synonyms, as well as the hyperonym and the paremiological antonyms. It also indicates the key idea and type of paremy, the sources and a selection of contexts.

Equally, they include the meaning and observations that are both lexical (formal clarifications or content of some word, being in disuse or being an archaism) as well as cultural. The correspondences are accompanied by the literal translation, the possible variants, besides synonyms and antonyms, sources and contexts.

The objectives of this refranero are to spread Spanish through proverbs, to facilitate the teaching / learning of Spanish as mother tongue and foreign language, to provide an instrument of consultation to translators and to promote research on popular wisdom.