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Uses of the pluperfect subjunctive

 

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  #1  
Old September 03, 2017, 04:36 AM
dupond dupond is offline
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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
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  #2  
Old September 03, 2017, 09:15 AM
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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.
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Old September 03, 2017, 05:35 PM
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Can hubiera disfrutado be used interchangeably with habría disfrutado?
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Old September 03, 2017, 06:27 PM
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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.
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Old September 03, 2017, 10:41 PM
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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?
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