Preterit or imperfect?
In most of the translations, this statement gets put into the the imperfect, but i see it as preterit.
He has confessed to the crime. wouldn't that be a preterit(completed action) but most translations i have checked use the imperfect conjugation. who is correct?
3 Answers
Your reasoning is correct, it should be the preterite (unless there´s some other indication that he confessed more than once, I suppose).
I´m not sure how you got translations with the imperfect -- when I tried it, I got the present perfect ("ha confesado"). When I took out "has" in the English, I got the preterite. But anyway, translators are not very good with nuances yet, and they change all the time...
Like in English, in Spanish there are differences of use between "ha confesado / confesó" (has confessed / confessed), specially at both sides of the Atlantic, so both options are possible and correct, depending on where they are used, and how. I can’t see how the imperfect tense can be used in this sentence, unless the person was confessing several times (without giving details about its end), or you are describing the confession as it happened (without giving details about its end), which is something you'll encounter in newspapers, but not often in spoken Spanish.
I agree with kattya, when the "has" remains in the sentence, there is a different feel to it, and it is not the preterit tense even in English. If you simply said "he confessed to the crime" it would be preterit. If you were looking for the imperfect, you might make the sentence background information such as "he was confessing to the crime, when..."
