4.3 Translating time expressions with the present tense in Spanish to English

As we referred to in section 4.1 of this chapter, Spanish employs ‘time expressions with hacer’, as well as the verbs llevar and sometimes tener with the present simple tense to describe events which began in the past and continue in the present. These events require the use of the present perfect, or present perfect continuous in English and should be translated to one of those tenses. Examples of time expressions:

Example. 4.6

To render the sentence, “I’ve lived in Oregon for three years/ I’ve been living in Oregon for three years.”, there are several options in Spanish:

If you encounter any of these time expressions when translating from Spanish to English, it is important for the integrity of the message that you translate the verb used in the present simple tense in a time expression in Spanish to the present perfect (I’ve lived) or present perfect continuous (I’ve been living) in English. Let’s look some more examples:

Example 4.7

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