Volume 55, Issue 2

Metalanguage is the expression of language's self-referentiality. It is most evident in cases of autonymy, i. e. when a word is used to signify itself, which provide for downright untranslability on a semantical level. However, a language-critical text like Adorno's Jargon der Eigentlichkeit shows how difficult it can become not only to translate instances of foregrounded language, but to draw a line between primary language and metalanguage, direct and reported speech.

An important element in T&I studies is the problem of teaching translation and interpreting. The following article does not, however, try to answer the question of whether and how we can teach translation to students. The focal point lies instead on the concept of translation/interpreting competence(s) and the question of whether cultivating all the competences identified by T&I studies as essential to translating/interpreting does not in fact entail trying to turn students into universal geniuses. What would this mean for university teachers? And can we integrate the competences defined in T&I studies into a concise model which can be of use in developing realistic teaching methods?

One of the most important fields in translator's work is the translation of instruction texts – a text type that clearly ref lects the functional concept of intercultural text transfer. Its text type norms are highly conventionalised and vary from one culture to another. But instruction texts may also contain several other cultural and language specifics that need to be adapted to the target culture. Using the example of a recipe, the author points out the importance of a thorough text analysis to sustain functional adequacy, which is the priority objective for that kind of text. The analysis is followed by a commentary on the translational decisions, stating the strategies and methods used to achieve the priority objective.

This paper explores the possibilities of translating German modals into English. One objective is to provide translators with a guide on translating modals by making them aware of the wide diversity of meanings and nuances of German modals and by helping them find the best translation possible for a given context. This guide is intended to be a dictionary for translators that is more parole-orientated and user-friendly than standard dictionaries. At the same time the paper also presents a yet undiscussed linguistic approach to analyzing one aspect of two languages in the context of translations. The excerpt starts out with theoretical aspects on the topic and continues with displaying the results of the analysis of one German modal, namely mögen . The analysis was conducted by browsing through various dictionaries and translation corpora. In the end, we can see a first attempt of a translator's dictionary. It's also clear to see that German modals are complex words with multiple meanings and facets and that most of the equivalences found are one-to-many equivalences.

Political linguistics is underrepresented in contemporary linguistics research for different reasons. In this article, the author outlines how discourse theory and computational linguistics can be applied to political linguistics to make it more relevant again to both linguistics community and the public. To that end, findings concerning the language use of the political parties in the German Bundestag between 2005 and 2009 are presented.

This article deals with French and German advertisements on web search engines from a linguistic point of view. It attempts to shed some light on the lexical and morphosyntactic structure of the displayed advertisements by analyzing a corpus of 329 Google ads related to the tourism industry. The most relevant findings concern the higher percentage of foreign words detected in the German ads and the very different phrase structure of the advertisement's body of text.

The present article deals with the question of how - on the one hand - the current “multimedia revolution” changes our conceptions of text, text production and text reception, and which challenges arise from these changes for Applied Linguistics and for Communication Sciences on the other hand. The fact that in the construction of texts other codes are increasingly significant in addition to the verbal-linguistic code needs a wide and interdisciplinary perspective and the cooperation between linguistics and semiotics. From a perspective based on textual semiotics, the author intends to describe the characteristics and specifics of multimodal texts, in order to present a model for their description and characterization. The question which first arises is how the different codes which participate in the construction of the text interact, in what way they are connected and what their constitutive participation in the resulting superior meaning of the whole text is. These theoretical observations are finally illustrated by examples from print advertising, since print advertisements are understood as the epitome of multimodal super-texts, and because of the fact that the above described modifications and changes in our text world appear in a broad manner in texts of mass communication.

In Zeiten des Kyoto-Protokolls, des beschlossenen deutschen Atomausstiegs und des weltweit wachsenden Hungers nach Energie stellt sich die Frage, wie der Energiebedarf zukünftiger Generationen gedeckt werden kann, ohne dass wir unsere Umwelt weiter belasten. Erneuerbare Energien erscheinen vor diesem Hintergrund als Wunderwaffe, die von Umweltschützern gepriesen und Politikern gefördert wird. Der Windenergie kommt dabei in Deutschland eine besondere Rolle zu. Laut Bundesverband WindEnergie (BWE) deckte sie 2008 etwa sieben Prozent des deutschen Stromverbrauchs und produzierte damit die Hälfte des deutschen „Ökostroms“. Doch wie genau verwandelt das Wunderwerk Windenergieanlage die kinetische Energie des Windes in elektrischen Strom? Und wie wird gewährleistet, dass dieser Strom trotz schwankender Windgeschwindigkeiten von gleichbleibender Qualität ist? Das sind nur zwei von vielen spannenden Fragen aus dem Bereich der Windenergie, denen die im Oktober 2008 am Institut für Linguistik und Translatologie Leipzig eingereichte Diplomarbeit „Windenergieanlagen. Eine terminologische Untersuchung im Deutschen und Englischen unter besonderer Berücksichtigung moderner Antriebskonzepte.“, die in Zusammenarbeit mit der Leipziger Terrawatt Planungsgesellschaft mbH erstellt wurde, nachgeht. Das nachfolgende Glossar ist ein wesentlicher Teil dieser Diplomarbeit und soll sowohl Translatoren als auch Fachleuten aus der Windenergiebranche als zuverlässige Referenz in terminologischen Fragen dienen.