Volume 55, Issue 1

Self-marketing of Freelancers on the Internet More than 300 language professionals answered the survey “Self-marketing of Freelance Translators and Interpreters on the Internet”. Participants were asked if they own a website and how they use marketing-related Internet services such as networking platforms and online communities. Furthermore, respondents shared their opinions on which contents to publish online, including, for example, photos, work samples, prices and references. Results prove that many freelancers pursue an array of web marketing strategies. However, some find the effects hard to track and stress the continued importance of personal client contact and recommendations.

Linguistic and conceptual differences between legal languages are closely related to the distance between the corresponding legal systems. This is illustrated by a comparison of Anglo-American law texts on the one hand and texts and terminology from continental systems like French and German law on the other hand. Special problems arise in officially multilingual states like Switzerland which has one common legal system and four different legal languages. All legal documents in these languages are considered as original texts, not as translations. The same principle applies to the European Union where all documents have to be absolutely equivalent and linguistically authentic in each of the 23 official languages.

Especially for non-experts, translating legal texts is a complicated and multifaceted process, demanding much linguistic and technical competence from translators. Legal systems differ from one another, and each one has a specific set of norms, especially reflected at the lexical level – that is, in terminology. Understanding two legal systems is not easy, even for experts; of course, it is even more difficult for translators, who are usually not legal experts. This article focuses on how to quickly and transparently provide translators with some (basic) technical knowledge using ontologies, which in recent years have found considerable application in synthesizing and visualizing knowledge.

This review recommends parliamentary novels and political thrillers as helpful for interpreters, if only in small talk. Their reading is enjoyable too. These books are showing the world of politicians, civil servants, journalists, and spin-doctors at parliament and in election campaigns. These fictions offer insights, how they live and act, think and speak, how they are using words, which say nothing, or the opposite, their terminology, idioms, and abbreviations. This criticism says in general, there are Oldies but Goldies. In addition it suggests movies and TV series from the UK and USA.

The systemic differences between German and Spanish verb forms, and their values and uses, often pose a problem in translation. This is the case of the interpretation of temporal meaning in the German Präteritum (in literary texts) for a correct selection of tense in Spanish. The contrastive study of temporal expression in the German Präteritum and the possible Spanish equivalents of pretérito perfect simple (simple past) and pretérito imperfecto (imperfect) reveal the need to study temporality from two perspectives: tenses as time expressions together with other textual elements, and tenses as morphosyntactic and semantic phenomena in the sentence.

A Spanish negative sentence contains items and structures that create a suitable syntactic environment for items and item groups showing an inherent negative meaning. A large number of Spanish phraseologisms can only be used if a negation had been triggered in the same sentence or the same syntagma. The goal of this article is to analyse different cases and rules linked to the triggering of negation in the Spanish language in order to provide a basis for drawing conclusions about their systematic use in Spanish phraseography. This article will show entries taken out of the Diccionario español-alemán de locuciones del español de España, a work which is currently being elaborated by a team of students, linguists and translators, and evaluate their significance as an alternative to present phraseographic solutions.

Terminology theory aims at unambiguous communication. However, as this article shows, even some established terms and concepts of terminology theory leave room for interpretation. The author, chairman of DIN standardization committee NA 105.00-01 AA (principles of terminology theory), addresses standardization (in DIN 2342) and usage of the German terms “Terminologie”, “Terminus”, “Polysemie”, “Quasisynonymie”, and “Homonymie”.

With increasing demands for the use of authentic language in the teaching of a second language, the potential role of corpora has been an important issue of discussion in the last two decades. Corpora have helped to reveal patterns of real language use and uncovered discrepancies between the language portrayed in textbooks and the language used in real life. This article focuses on corpus-driven as well as corpus-based grammar teaching, summarising the experience of applying ACORN (the Aston Corpus Network) in the teaching of Spanish Grammar to students in the School of Languages and Social Sciences at Aston University. Our main goals were to show the students a large number of examples taken from authentic language texts, in order to support the grammar explained in class, and to provide them with a very useful resource that they can use while writing essays, preparing for exams, etc.

While much has been written on the linguistic and sociolinguistic features of rhyming slang, the literature on the subject remains remarkably silent on its socio-geographical distribution in Ireland. Building on the findings of an article published by the author in 2004, this new study moves the analysis on to consider the recent growth of rhyming slang in the language of the young generation living on the Southside of Dublin. More generally, this article seeks to demonstrate that, far from having disappeared from Dublin usage, this kind of slang is in fact gaining substantial ground in the speech of the capital.

The process of creating a transeuropean interoperable rail network is an everyday challenge, creating new problems due to different track gauges or voltage systems and leading to new technical developments, implementations and comfort improvements for passengers. Translators and interpreters are faced with various problems: terms and definitions vary between companies and synonyms are not recognised. Furthermore, there is still a lack of mono- and bilingual handbooks, which cover all the aspects and technical components of passenger trains and multiple units. The following glossary is part of a terminological diploma thesis on passenger trains written at the University of Leipzig.