In what follows, a brief description is provided of the main functions of the German conjunctions als and wenn, as a backdrop to the task.

ALS

The polysemy of als lies mainly in its double role as a temporal and as a modal conjunction. In its latter function it may introduce a subordinate clause, a part of a sentence or a word; furthermore, it may occur in complex expressions (sowohl... als auch; insofern, als; zu... als dass). In most cases the modal als introduces a comparison or a specification.

In its temporal sense, als usually introduces a subordinate clause referring to events that (a) occurred in the past simultaneously with the events expressed in the main clause, indicating a certain point in time; (b) occurred in the past before the events expressed in the main clause, and c) occured in the past after the events expressed in the main clause.

WENN

The main values of wenn are time and condition, two values that are closely interrelated (Drosdowski et al. 1984: 700), not only in German. The use of temporal notions like before and after in order to define more abstract notions like cause and effect has been observed by several scholars (Drosdowski et al. 1984: 697; Cuenca 1992–1993 and 1999: 173; Pérez Saldanya and Salvador 1995: 91). The conjunction nachdem, for example, has a temporal and a causal meaning, although the latter is no longer used in standard German. For Catalan, Salvador (2002: 2989) highlights the semantic proximity between certain causal and conditional clauses, on the one hand, and between the latter and temporal clauses, on the other.

The cognitive approach to polysemous phenomena enables us to see this kind of evolutions as generally occurring in different languages, that is, it may account for the change (or extension) from a temporal to a conditional value in the case of the German conjunction wenn, as well as for the fact that the Catalan contextual equivalent of wenn in its conditional meaning is often the temporal conjunction quan. But the temporal sense of als is also normally translated as quan, which contributes to make this kind of translation problem more complex. A further value of wenn (usually in combination with auch) is concessivity, corresponding to the Catalan encara que (`'even if ', 'even though').