The conjunctions als and wenn have been singled out for study because students, unaware of their polysemy, tend to translate them automatically into Catalan as quan (“when”) and si (“if ”), respectively. But the German conjunctions als and wenn pose problems to translator trainees not only on the grounds of their polysemous character, but also of their partial overlap in temporal meaning.

Actually, this overlap results in pragmatic ambiguity, insofar as only the context can determine which meaning prevails in each case, a phenomenon closely related to polysemy, linguistic change, and grammaticalization (Sweetser 1990).