Volume 64, Issue 1

The ideology and worldviews of a community may be shifted and modified through social changes brought about by political upheavals. In a country like Iran, the Islamic revolution (1979/80) has played a major role in re-shaping the ideology of the governing body which among many other things involves modifications in the language policy. After the revolution, Persian speakers were encouraged to be more conservative in their use of language. As a result, those who tended to produce discourse which was more conservative and Islam-oriented became more popular and respected among the Iranian people. Ideology is one of the major factors which influences the manipulation of language use in translation. Prefaces and introductions which form the paratexts to a translated product often contain expressions of a translator’s ideology, and this usually manifests itself in the translation product. This study aims to describe the ideological impact of the social situation both in the pre- and post-revolutionary era in Iran on translations of George Orwell’s famous political novel, Nineteen Eighty-Four (1949) into Persian. This study will, therefore, compare the prefaces in three Persian translations of Nineteen Eighty-Four which were produced before and after the 1979 Iranian Islamic Revolution. The three Persian translations are by Mehdi Bahremand (1976), Zhila Sazegar (1980) and Saleh Hosseini (1982). This study employs Farahzad’s (2012) second dimension of the three-dimensional translation criticism model i. e. paratextual analysis alongside Lefevere’s (1992) theory of manipulation to investigate some of the lexical differences that manifest themselves in the pre-and post-revolutionary Persian translations of Nineteen Eighty-Four which reflect the personal ideologies of the three Persian translators as explicitly or implicitly expressed in their prefaces.

Advertising language in peninsular Spanish has been the subject of extensive study due to its innovative nature and richness of expression. Most attention has been paid to the communication processes involved, its linguistic functions, and its shortening communicative mechanisms at morphological, lexico-semantic and syntactic levels; however, the functions of English and German loanwords and the reasons for their remarkable productivity in advertising written texts have been addressed less frequently. Using data from a 200,000 word personally gathered linguistic corpus extending throughout the period 1998–2007, I focus on the reasons and factors that are responsible for the high productivity of these lexical Anglicisms and the noteworthiness of Germanisms in contemporary press advertising peninsular Spanish. The analysis here examines their semantic nature following a semantic typology adapted for the special tecnolect of advertising. Under discussion will be, among others, the main reasons which may account for the high productivity of loanwords in advertising language with special reference to several examples and a presentation of the results obtained comparing both Anglicisms and Germanisms regarding their semantic categorization and the corresponding considerations that derive from it.

In the late 1950s, the last major works of W.E.B. Du Bois appeared in the Soviet Union, the German Democratic Republic and other Eastern Bloc countries before they were published in the US. While Eastern Bloc countries provided welcome support for Du Bois at a time when he was effectively blacklisted in America, they found that his texts presented them with certain challenges. On the one hand, the GDR printed his English-language anthology An ABC of Color complete and without editorial interference. When it came to translating his Autobiography in the GDR and USSR, however, some chapters were dropped for reasons of space, while others were reformulated or excised to eliminate politically awkward views, religious vocabulary, and matters touching on sexuality. This essay provides a close examination of selected passages in the German and Russian translations, compares them with the English original, and argues that in making Du Bois conform to accepted views, the East German and Russian versions straight-jacketed his text.

Building on previous research on the new subfield of Linguistic Landscape (LL), this article adopts a comparative approach to study language policy practices that take place on the ground in East Belgium, a language contact area which is not usually considered conflictive. The research design is both qualitative and quantitative and aimed at overcoming some critical methodological issues. The taxonomy, which distinguishes different types of items in the LL of two municipalities with language facilities, Kelmis and Waimes, has led to a detailed qualitative analysis of the application of the current language legislation.

Automation is affecting all spheres of our daily lives and humans are adapting both to the challenges that it poses and the benefits that it brings. The translation profession has also experienced the impact of new technologies with Language Service Providers adapting to changes (Presas/Cid-Leal/Torres-Hostench 2016; Sakamoto/Rodríguez de Céspedes/Evans/Berthaud 2017). Translation trainers are not oblivious to this phenomenon. There have indeed been efforts to incorporate the teaching of digital translation tools and new technologies in the translation classroom (Doherty/Kenny/Way 2012; Doherty/Moorkens 2013; Austermühl 2013; O’Hagan 2013; Gaspari/Almaghout/Doherty 2015; Moorkens 2017) and many translation programmes in Europe are adapting their curricula to incorporate this necessary technological competence (Rothwell/Svoboda 2017). This paper reflects on the impact that automation and, more specifically machine translation and computer assisted tools, have and will have on the future training of translators and on the balance given by translation companies to language and technological skills.

The present article attempts to analyze the particularities of the practice of literary translation from a language of peripheral culture to a language of central culture, based on the case of Korean literature. Because of the inequality that governs the relations between the two cultures involved, the transfer from one to the other raises extratextual problems. After briefly tracing the history of the translation of Korean literary works into widely spoken languages, especially in the French-speaking communities, this paper deals with the specific characteristics and modalities of this activity, as well as with their influence on the translations itself, focusing on the choice of works to be translated, the distinctive features of their translators, the translation processes they implement and the socio-cultural context in which the translation is done.

The article deals with the ability of modal particles in German to build modal-evaluative frame of the utterance. It is shown that they attract other modal or evaluative elements in the sentence. It becomes evident when modal particles are used in some types of dependent clauses, after modal words or if they encode causal relations between sentences. The author considers them as central components of modal-evaluative frame because they express multiplane deixis and are possible in the utterances which are made from the inner perspective.

The terminology database TERMDAT is at the very heart of the Terminology Section of the Swiss Federal Chancellery’s Central Language Services. It provides Swiss legal and administrative terminology predominantly for the four national languages German, French, Italian, and Romansh (plus English). However, data exchange with cooperating actors (Federal Departments, cantons, external service providers, etc.) constitutes a particular challenge, since these actors operate with different systems and data models. The present article describes a solution developed within a pilot project aiming at providing means to substantially improve data flow within a highly heterogeneous database landscape.