Volume 67, Issue 2

The following article discusses the translation problems of a specific kind of lexical units, the beastionyms, which have been defined as the names given to different science-fiction and fantasy creatures. Walter Moers is well-known in Poland as the author of Camonian novels and is increasingly popular with readers in Poland. The theoretical part of this paper describes the concept of a beastionym as a lexical unit being a transitional form between an appellative and a proper name. The author presents selected examples of how beastionyms function in literature and audio-visual products, relating them to chrematonyms according to Ronneberger-Sibold (2004). The beastionyms described in the article have been divided into speaking, allusive and sound-symbolic lexical units. The basis for this division was the work of Dieter Lamping (1983). The theoretical part also briefly presents translation techniques that can be implemented in the process of beastionyms’ translation. This paper is focused, for economic reasons, on the translation of beastionyms, which characterize their bearers and divide them into lexical units indicating the bearer's habitat, appearance and behaviour. Monolingual dictionaries of German, Polish, and, in special cases, English have been used to describe individual examples. Lexemes with special cultural significance were described with reference to the relevant literature. The article provides a detailed description of these lexical units and gives a qualitative translation analysis of different translation techniques, which were used in the Polish rendition of the novel „Der Schrecksenmeister“ (written by Walter Moers) to create a successful translation of beastionyms. The paper ends with some conclusions about useful translation procedures, which may be used within translation of beastionyms.

The data-driven paradigm of neural machine translation is a powerful translation technology based on state-of-the art approaches in artificial intelligence research. This technology is employed extensively in the professional translation process, requiring an adequate degree of machine translation literacy on the part of professional translators. At the same time, the increasing datafication to be observed in modern society – both in private as well as in professional contexts – contributes to the rise in prominence of another digital literacy, i. e., data literacy, which is also of high relevance with regard to data-driven machine translation. The present paper analyses and discusses in detail the individual dimensions and subdimensions of professional machine translation literacy and data literacy and attempts to integrate the two concepts. It thereby lays the theoretical foundation for a didactic project concerned with teaching data literacy in its machine translation-specific form to students in the fields of translation and specialised communication studies.

Twenty-first century societies are increasingly connected thanks to new technologies and the use of English as a lingua franca. This means that students have to be proficient in all four English language skills (writing, reading, listening and speaking) in order to obtain a university degree and get a job. Despite the fact that English is studied in Spain from a very early age, it seems that learners fail to acquire English language proficiency. Therefore, the main objective of this article is to investigate the effectiveness of gamification as an active methodology for teaching English, specifically to students of the BA in Translation and Interpreting at the University of Malaga (Spain). To this end, we have employed a mixed methodology to collect quantitative and qualitative data on the opinions of a sample of students of the mentioned degree. The results demonstrate that gamification has many positive effects on learning, as it enables students to be more motivated in the classroom.

This paper focuses on a collocation study of a historical newspaper corpus for the years between 1845 and 1860. After defining the meaning of collocations for the purpose of the study, the creation of the historical newspaper corpus as well as the method of data analysis is described. The main part of the contribution is then dedicated to a content analysis of the collocations found in a corpus of mid-19th century German-American newspapers.

The translation of German modal particles into other languages, especially those poorer in particles, such as the Albanian language, is a challenging enterprise. Their meaning depends heavily on the context. Different meanings have been recorded in the literature: marking what is said as true or known to the listener (Thurmair 1989, Schoonjans 2013, 2018), further nuances such as justification/explanation, reproach, admission, surprise, etc. (see Feyrer 1998, Schoonjans 2013, Müller 2014). The dependency on context and the wide range of meanings make particles an interesting object of investigation in contrastive linguistics and in translation studies, where one investigates the question of the equivalent linguistic means or the translation strategies to be employed. This article examines the translatability of the modal particle doch from German into Albanian. On the basis of the corpus examination, it should be determined to what extent the modal particle doch or the modal nuances expressed through it have been transferred into Albanian. Since modal particles feature mainly in spoken language – but there is no such translated corpus from German into Albanian – a corpus of 692 occurrences of spoken language rendered in literature (short and long fiction, drama) has been compiled for this study, collected from various literary works. They are divided into four groups according to the translation strategies used: omission, transposition, paraphrasing, word-for-word translations. This research study confirms the results of other studies, which show that in almost 50 % of the cases modal particles are not translated, which impacts the quality of translation. If particles are translated, then in the majority of cases the translation strategy of transposition is used, followed by paraphrasing and, only in a small fraction of translations, a word-for-word translation strategy is used.

The verbal periphrases constitute a typological feature of the Romance languages and they are especially frequent in the Iberoromanic languages. In the context of this paper the use of the Italian periphrase andare + participio passato in the language of politics will be analysed. In addition, possible reasons for the high frequency of this verbal construction in political discourses in the Italian language will be discussed. The study is based on a pragmasyntactic approach because the syntactic phenomena, in the present case the verbal periphrase, will be analysed from a pragmatic point of view. Furthermore, we will examine possible equivalent constructions – still under a pragmasyntactic perspective – in French and Spanish political discourses provided by the digital corpus EUROPARL7.

In this paper, the explicit compliments within male gender-homogeneous groups are examined in a contrastive way. There are some findings in gender linguistics that notice a low frequency of this speech act in male groups and ascribe certain thematic priorities to them. Although it has been postulated that compliments men exchange have more to do with the evaluation of their performance and authority assertion, [the] male complimenting behavior is also seen as highly ambivalent. The following study examines whether there are certain differences and similarities in the frequency, subject matter, grammatical and phonological design of explicit compliments in [the] groups of males with different cultural backgrounds.

In the context of a digital revolution that predicts a change of rules in different sectors of the future economy and in order to comply with the requirements of the extremely changing labor market, the education sector is faced with the big challenge of sustaining teaching quality. Competence-based training (CBT) seems to offer the best way of reaching this aim, but teaching using the CBT model requires specific teaching competences. After publishing a framework for translator and translation competences, the EMT network publishes the Translator Trainer Profile that outlines the competences that translator trainer staff should possess. The School of Translators and Interpreters of Beirut (ETIB) of Saint Joseph University of Beirut, member of the EMT network since 2019, conducted a qualitative research with the aims of identifying the teaching competences required from its teachers. This article exposes the results and the different steps undertaken in this research.

We focus on examining the impact of machine translation (MT) error rate on adequacy and fluency in machine-translated journalistic texts. German is the source language, with significant polysynthetic features in the formation of composites, and the target language is Slovak, with predominantly inflected features. We analyse twelve error categories, which are incorporated into the categorical framework for the analysis of MT errors and correspond to the four-member core MQM-DQF error typology. The results show that the most significant errors are in the categories of lexical semantics, syntactic-semantic correlativeness and grammar.