Uses of the pluperfect subjunctive
 

Hi everyone

I recently came across the following sentence and translation on http://context.reverso.net/traduccio...s/en+lugar+de:

Hubiera disfrutado mucho en lugar de morir ahogado.

He could be having such a good time instead of being in that awful shipwreck.

Is the translation correct? I've never seen the pluperfect subjunctive used that way before.


Thanks

He would have enjoyed himself a lot instead of dying by drowning.

Unfortunately, without a paragraph or two of context on either side it's very hard to tell whether the translation works as a whole. It's clearly intended to be a static rather than a dynamic translation, so the change of verb sense could be an intentional alteration which improves the sense of the passage.

Can hubiera disfrutado be used interchangeably with habría disfrutado?

No. The subjunctive mood is used for a reason, but we don't know the context.
You cannot substitute the conditional mood and convey the same meaning.

I'm afraid I only have that sentence without the surrounding passages. It came from a list of examples of using "en lugar de" in a sentence.

What would be an example of a sentence in which you'd use "hubiera + past participle" to mean "would have (done something)" instead of "habría + past participle?