Volume 70, Issue 2 - Themenheft Special Issue „Kulturelle Missverständnisse im Spannungsfeld von Literatur und Linguistik“

This article examines the critical and subversive linguistic strategies employed by Zé do Rock in his fourth book, jede sekunde stirbt ein nichtraucher: a lexicon üba vorurteile un andre teile (2009). Conceived as an alphabetically structured reference work, the so-called “lexicon” integrates short entries and extended sections featuring cultural comparisons, travel experiences, and reflections on otherness. By playing on linguistic and cultural misunderstandings, it deconstructs perceptions of foreignness and invites readers to critically reassess their biases and preconceptions. This approach fosters a critical engagement with mechanisms of discrimination and stereotyping. The study investigates how his deliberate humoristic creation of communicative barriers challenges essentialist notions of identity. Additionally, it interrogates how these disruptions, far from obstructing communication, serve as a platform for exploring new pathways through processes of cultural translation toward successful transcultural dialogue. In doing so, the article highlights the transformative potential of misunderstanding as a means to rethink intercultural exchanges and to promote a more nuanced understanding of cultural diversity.

The translation of migration literature is a particular challenge for translators. In this contribution, I shall explore the English and German translations of Faïza Guène’s novel Kiffe kiffe demain , Alain Mabanckou’s Black Bazar and Fatou Diome’s Le ventre de l’Atlantique. In this context, I will discuss the different choices made by the translators and analyse how they manage to avoid cultural misunderstandings, how they fall prey to cultural misunderstandings or how they generate cultural misunderstandings in their own translation. The task of translating references to a specific migrant sub-culture is particularly demanding when the latter does not exist in the culture of the target text. Due to France’s colonial history, a strong presence of citizens from the Maghreb and sub-Saharan Africa can be observed in different parts of the country, which is not the case in Germany or in the UK. Thus, the translators have to act as cultural mediators in order to communicate a specific cultural environment to a German-speaking and Anglophone readership, which might not be familiar with the functioning of certain a milieu of French society.

The present article is concerned with the translational strategies employed by translators of the Swedish crime novel Kinesen by Henning Mankell. In this context, I shall focus on the translation of pronominal address forms, indicating the social distance between the novel’s characters. The aim is to demonstrate how the decisions taken by the translators might generate intercultural misunderstandings. The translation of pronominal address forms is a particular challenge as they depict the social relationships between characters. All the languages quoted in this article possess a binary address system of pronouns of proximity and distance, at least if we consider the contemporary standard varieties of the countries where the translations were published. Nevertheless, the contemporary rules of use differ significantly. Swedish is of particular interest as a source language because, since the so-called du -reform of the 1960 s, the pronoun du can be regarded as the unmarked form of address. Consequently, a multitude of dialogue constellations exist in which a Swedish du cannot be directly translated into the target language using a 2 nd person singular pronoun.

This article examines the role of translation as a site of cultural misunderstandings and explores to what extent the concentration of culture- and subculture-specific elements within a text, along with their aesthetic realisation, poses a particular challenge for translators. Using Amanda Gorman’s viral inaugural poem The Hill We Climb (2021) as a case study, the analysis investigates how linguistic, cultural, and discursive elements of the original have been transformed in the German translation. Special attention is given to the translators’ approach to civil-religious discourse and the jeremiad as a text genre, as well as the resulting sacral-religious tone, which has been significantly reduced or entirely neutralised in the German translation. Furthermore, this article focusses on the translation of subcultural elements of African American literary, cultural, and linguistic traditions, particularly double-voicedness , orality, and signifyin(g) , as well as race-based terminology. The analysis reveals that these shifts reflect not only linguistic adaptations but also deeper cultural differences, raising fundamental questions about the translatability of culturally encoded texts.

This article examines cultural lacks of understanding which occur on the textual and material level. Using the theoretical framework and methodology of textual linguistics, this article considers textual genres as cultural artifacts. Analyses of textual examples show that materiality is both central to the reception of a text and determinant for it. Materiality can also carry cultural meaning, e. g. knowledge about the text’s cultural context. When materiality is misunderstood, the receiver outside the cultural community fails to perceive the strategies intended to increase communicative effectiveness, to manipulate reception and to focus on playful creativity with an aesthetic dimension. Misunderstandings may occur, but do not affect the essence of the message. The partial understanding affects the pragmatic and social dimension of the text. In this sense, cultural incomprehension generated by the materiality of texts deserves to be investigated, especially in relation to the increasing prevalence of multimodality in public spaces and the growing presence of images in communication.

In research on political discourse, the text genre “open letter” has received little attention. Widespread in France, it is used by political parties and private individuals. Some parties employ the “open letter” more often than others. Contrasting studies on the form and function of this particular text type have become increasingly important as the “open letter” is frequently used as a means of communication in the context of EU politics. Appellative texts, in particular, may not be decoded by readers coming from different cultural backgrounds. This lack of comprehension might cause intercultural misunderstandings. The aim of this article is to explore the function of “open letters” used by French, German, Italian and Spanish populist parties. The analysis shall be carried out from an ideological and culturally comparative perspective.

In order to communicate as efficiently as possible within the framework of international marketing communication, companies must take into account the preferences of their target groups in their communication campaigns. The tourism sector is of particular relevance in the context of these considerations, as the international anchoring and the resulting clash of national and cultural stereotypes are particularly pronounced. The chapter compares different Club Med’s websites, which are aimed at a German and a French audience, in order to check whether the texts use strategies of cultural adaptation. Such strategies can potentially help to avoid cultural misunderstandings, inappropriate ideas about a destination and potential negative economic consequences for the company. In this context, we shall analyze the structure of the websites, their multimodal conception, the use of persuasive strategies and the selection of linguistic means.

The Covid-19 pandemic has had an impact on communication practices and practices at work by fostering collaboration in virtual environments. Against the backdrop of the Covid-19 pandemic, this paper deals with virtuality as a catalyst for textual and linguistic change using the example of Italian-language email communication and chat communication in video conferencing, two forms of communication relevant to the organizational workplace. Within the university context, which provides the setting of the present study, the pandemic acted as a catalyst for virtuality in several regards. The aim of the paper is to take a descriptive and explanatory account of both linguistic and textual genre practices of Italian in the digital space, which are examined in the light of change. In doing so, it draws on approaches and models from the fields of text and media linguistics, variational linguistics, workplace discourse, organizational, and institutional communication. As the investigation shows, it proves particularly insightful to engage with the concept of proximity and distance from Romance linguistics (Koch/Oesterreicher 1985, 2011), and with the concept of the Communicative Constitution of Organizations from organization studies (e. g. Brummans et al. 2014).

Der vorliegende Beitrag untersucht die Nutzung von ChatGPT zur Textproduktion und -korrektur im Französischunterricht der Sekundarstufe II. Basierend auf videographischer Unterrichtsbeobachtung wird die Interaktion der Lernenden mit der KI-Anwendung analysiert, wobei der Fokus auf der kritischen Bewertung und der effektiven Nutzung von KI-generierten Inhalten durch die Lernenden liegt. Die Analyseergebnisse zeigen, dass die kritisch-reflexive Verwendung von ChatGPT das Schreiben, Überarbeiten und Beurteilen von Texten in der Fremdsprache fördern kann: Durch den Einsatz einer Unterrichtskonzeption, die auf einen kritischen Umgang mit ChatGPT abzielt, wurden digitale Lese- und Schreibfähigkeiten der Lernenden adressiert und diese dazu angeregt, die KI-Anwendung selbstständig und verantwortungsbewusst für die eigene Textproduktion zu nutzen. Zugleich deuten die Ergebnisse darauf hin, dass sich die Nutzung von ChatGPT zur fremdsprachlichen Textproduktion und -korrektur v. a. hinsichtlich stilistischer Aspekte nicht uneingeschränkt als nützlich erweist. Die Studie unterstreicht die Notwendigkeit von Unterrichtskonzepten, die Lernende bei der zielführenden Nutzung von KI-Anwendungen unterstützen und v. a. deren Prompt Literacy und Metakognition fördern.

Accessibility refers to the conditions that processes, products and services must meet to be understandable and usable for everyone. This includes specialized information like medical reports. The current legislation in Spain and other European countries grants patients access to their medical history. However, their clinical reports often include numerous technicalities that hinder patients’ comprehension and access to potentially important health information. Large Language Models (LLMs) can be used for intralingual translation of specialized texts with the aim of adapting them for lay users. However, their suitability for this task has not been evaluated with clinical reports in Spanish. Here, ChatGPT, Gemini and DeepSeek were used with two different prompts to adapt 250 anonymized clinical reports in Spanish and the difficulty of the translated texts was evaluated with the Spanish-validated Inflesz readability scale. Results showed that the three LLMs significantly improved readability, although the translated texts still fell into the “difficult” or “standard” categories. Despite positive results with the three LLMs, DeepSeek consistently outperformed ChatGPT, while the performance of Gemini depended markedly on the prompt and showed the largest variability. Further research is needed to assess the adequacy of these intralingual translations from the medical and the usability points of view.

Resumen La creciente movilidad de estudiantes y profesionales desde la creación del Espacio Europeo de Educación Superior y otros programas de intercambio internacional ha favorecido la demanda de traducciones juradas de documentos académicos; de hecho, los documentos académicos han constituido en los últimos años uno de los encargos de traducción más habituales que reciben los traductores jurados. Con el objetivo de proporcionar un marco claro para la toma de decisiones en las distintas fases del proceso de la traducción jurada de documentos académicos, Lobato y Relinque (2024:104–117) proponen una categorización de los problemas de traducción (en adelante PT) de dichos documentos. Esta categorización, obtenida de forma inductiva a partir de un enfoque funcionalista, se centra particularmente en la traducción del inglés al español de certificaciones académicas estadounidenses. En el trabajo que aquí se presenta las autoras profundizan aún más en la categorización presentada en 2024, detallando y analizando los diferentes ejemplos encontrados en el corpus y prestando especial atención a los problemas transversales que plantean los referentes culturales, la inter/intratextualidad y los elementos paralingüísticos, ya que se trata de elementos muy recurrentes en esta tipología textual.

This article is an attempt at a pragmalinguistically grounded approach to Easy Language – an approach that has received little attention in previous research on accessible communication. Specifically, using the German and French versions of an Easy Language text from the field of health communication – namely an information text on organ and tissue donation – this study aims to examine problematic aspects of the guiding principle of maximum explicitness, which is often emphasized in manuals and regulatory frameworks. Drawing on Levinson’s implicature model, which closely links implicated meanings to lexical-semantic and morphosyntactic elements and structures, the analysis seeks to demonstrate how linguistic structures endorsed by guidelines and implemented in accessible text products may, contrary to their intended purpose, trigger implicatures. Furthermore, this study seeks to highlight the need for a more nuanced conceptualization of implicitness in the Easy Language discourse – one that moves away from blanket classifications and instead considers implicatures in light of textual and pragmalinguistic factors. In order to better illustrate this issue and to contribute to future developments in Easy Language research, an attempt is also made to categorize the implicatures identified in the analyzed text according to their different potential effects.