"Has been"
How would you translate " the man has been swimming in the river all day?" Is it : El hombre ha estado nadando en el río? Or El hombre ha sido nadado en el río?
3 Answers
Hola David:
Strange as it may seem, I think the most common way to say this is:
El hombre lleva todo el dia nadando en el río.
This is an idiomatic use of llevar which is usually translated as "has been."
I suggest you study the SD dictionary entry for llevar. Do a word search on the page for "been" and you will see several more examples of this usage.
Llevar normally means "to take" To help this to make sense to me in English, when I first learned about I used to think:
The man is taking all day to swim in the lake. After awhile it wasn't necessary to do the mental gymnastics. This is actually quite a nice little feature of Spanish, to substitute a single word, where sometimes two or three are necessary in English. Similar constructions can be built with hacer, hacer que, desde hace, etc.
There are comparable uses of llevaba, ha llevado, etc. for the other tenses.
As Guillermo points our, some people will use he estado + gerundio. Estar and not ser is used with the gerundio for continuous ongoing actions.
First one. "El hombre ha estado nadando en el río". The second one is totally incorrect.
I just punched it in the translator and surprisingly 2 out of the 3 are incorrect. .Only PROMT gives you the right translation.
In terms of llevar + gerundio vs haber estado + gerundio I like the link below. Here's a portion of it. Or course, this is one Spanish speaker's opinion, but I have heard it from several others. However, I have noticed sometimes that what one person says is wrong or, "that isn't Spanish" is perfectly acceptable to other fluent Spanish speakers. Often this is due to regional differences, and in some cases can be traced back to U.S. or English influence on the Spanish language.
Una breve recomendación. A veces en clase un estudiante dice algo así: “he estado viviendo en Silver Spring por ocho años”. Estas construcciones con tiempos progresivos son raras en español. Uno se percata (se da cuenta, adivina, comprende) inmediatamente que es una traducción literal del inglés y, la verdad, no funciona. Las dos maneras correctas y coloquiales de decir esto son las que hemos visto: hace ocho años que vivo en Silver Spring / Llevo ocho años viviendo en Silver Spring. Prometo escribir algún día un artículo sobre estas formas progresivas o continuas en español, sobre cuándo son admisibles y cuándo no.
