Journal

Lebende Sprachen

Zeitschrift für interlinguale und interkulturelle Kommunikation

Editors-in-Chief: Ralph Krüger , Tinka Reichmann and Ursula Wienen

Languages: German, English

First published: January 1, 1956

Publication Frequency: 2 issues per year

View latest issue

Published by

Become an author with De Gruyter Brill

Submit Manuscript Author Information

About this journal

Since 1956, Lebende Sprachen [Living Languages] has been the leading specialist journal for interlingual and intercultural communication in Germany. The journal operates at the interface of translation studies, (contrastive) linguistics, specialised communication studies, terminology studies, and related areas and contains cross-lingual as well as language- and culture-specific articles and reviews on relevant publications in these areas.

Lebende Sprachen appears biannually. Articles can be submitted in German, English, French, and Spanish and will be peer-reviewed.

Your Benefits

The leading specialist journal for interlingual and intercultural communication for over 60 years
Short publishing cycles through ahead-of-print online publishing
Hybrid open access publication model
Selected articles can be accessed for free for 6 months
High-quality ensured through peer review and article proofreading
Publication in print as well as online
Extensive reach through German, English, French, and Spanish as publication languages
Excellent research basis through online availability of all previous issues

History

Lebende Sprachen was first published in 1956 by Langenscheidt, Berlin, and was edited by Alexander Lane and Günther Haensch.

Publicly Available
Posedición y paridad humano-máquina en traducción automática neuronal: Un estudio empírico desde la traducción profesional

September 18, 2025

Cristina Toledo-Báez

Download PDF
Requires Authentication Unlicensed
Licensed

ChatGPT zur Textproduktion und -korrektur im Französischunterricht der Sekundarstufe II –

September 9, 2025

Johanna Lea Korell, Maximilian Irion, Roland Ißler

Download PDF

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.
Requires Authentication Unlicensed
Licensed

Categorización de problemas de traducción en certificaciones académicas universitarias de los Estados Unidos: Importancia de las categorías transversales

August 28, 2025

Mariana Relinque, Julia Lobato

Download PDF

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.
Requires Authentication Unlicensed
Licensed

Bernal, Elisenda (2024) (Ed.): Col·loquial(s): Estudis de l’ús del català actual. Leipzig: Leipziger Universitätsverlag, 180 pages, ISBN: 978-3-96023-606-1.

August 20, 2025

Adriana Raya Palmer

Download PDF
Requires Authentication Unlicensed
Licensed

Implizit trotz maximaler Explizitheit: Beobachtungen und Überlegungen zum Funktions- und Wirkungspotential von Implikaturen am Beispiel von Swisstransplant

August 19, 2025

Paul Mayr

Download PDF

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.
Requires Authentication Unlicensed
Licensed

Are ChatGPT, Gemini and DeepSeek adequate for intralingual translation of clinical reports in Spanish? A readability quantitative study

August 18, 2025

Adriana M. Godoy-Lorenzatto

Download PDF

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.
Requires Authentication Unlicensed
Licensed

Italienische Chat- und E-Mail-Kommunikation vor dem Hintergrund der Covid-19-Pandemie: Organisationale Entscheidungskommunikation, Kommunikationsformen, gendergerechte Sprache und Lexik im Wandel

August 7, 2025

Miriam P. Leibbrand

Download PDF

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).

Issue 0

Issue 1

Themenheft „Die KI-gestützte Übersetzungsbranche“ Special Issue “The AI-based translation industry”

to be implemented...

Issue 0

Issue 70

Issue 69

Issue 68

Issue 67

Issue 66

Issue 65

Issue 64

Issue 63

Issue 62

Issue 61

Issue 60

Issue 59

Issue 58

Issue 57

Issue 56

Issue 55

Issue 54

Issue 53

Issue 52

Issue 51

Issue 50

Issue 49

Issue 48

Issue 47

Issue 46

Issue 45

Issue 44

Issue 43

Issue 42

Issue 41

Issue 40

Issue 39

Issue 38

Issue 37

Issue 36

Issue 35

Issue 34

Issue 33

Issue 32

Issue 31

Issue 30

Issue 29

Issue 28

Issue 27

Issue 26

Issue 25

Issue 24

Issue 23

Issue 22

Issue 21

Issue 20

Issue 19

Issue 18

Issue 17

Issue 16

Issue 15

Issue 14

Issue 13

Issue 12

Issue 11

Issue 10

Issue 9

Issue 8

Issue 7

Issue 6

Issue 5

Issue 4

Issue 3

Issue 2

Issue 1

Lebende Sprachen publishes special and thematic issues focussed on important and emerging topics in the field of study. The journal has established a rigorous process to ensure that any special issue manuscripts follow the same high-quality standards and peer review processes as regular manuscripts. For further information on the journal’s peer review policy please see the "Instructions for Authors".

Recent Special Issues

Volume 70 | Issue 1 Themenheft „Die KI-gestützte Übersetzungsbranche“ Special Issue “The AI-based translation industry”

CiteScore	0.6	2024, Scopus (Elsevier B.V., 2025)
SCImago Journal Rank	0.179	2024, SJR (Scimago Lab, 2025; Data Source: Scopus)
Source Normalized Impact per Paper	0.655	2024, CWTS Journal Indicators (CWTS B.V., 2025; Data Source: Scopus)

More information about journal rankings

Submit

Articles can be submitted at: http://mc.manuscriptcentral.com/les.

Detailed information on the submission of manuscripts via ScholarOne Manuscripts can be found on the Author Support page. You can also contact the editors of Lebende Sprachen with any questions or problems.

Please format your manuscript in accordance with the LES publication guidelines prior to submission.

Ahead of Print

Articles that have been successfully peer-reviewed will be initially published online "ahead of print" and then later assigned to a forthcoming issue of Lebende Sprachen. This ahead-of-print process allows for a very short publishing cycle.

Hybrid Open-Access

Authors have the opportunity to publish their articles under an open access license in Lebende Sprachen. The publication fee for a hybrid open access article is 2,000 euros (not including potential VAT fees). Please note that authors belonging to institutions with which we have a transformation agreement can publish using open access without incurring any costs. You can find further information on these agreements here.

Free Access

Two articles will be selected by the editors each year and will be made available for 6 months free of charge.

Repository Policy

After an embargo period of 12 months after initial publication, De Gruyter allows authors to use the published final version of their article (publisher’s pdf) for self-archiving (author’s personal webpage) and/or for archiving in an institutional directory (on a server operated without commercial interest).

The source of the published texts must be made recognisable and a link to the homepage of the journal or to the DOI of the article is required.

The authors may NOT archive their article in public and/or commercial thematic directories.

Further information on the De Gruyter repository policy can be found here.

Herausgeber
Prof. Dr. Ralph Krüger, TH Köln - University of Applied Sciences, Germany
Prof. Dr. Tinka Reichmann, Leipzig University, Germany
Prof. Dr. Ursula Wienen, TH Köln - University of Applied Sciences, Germany

Redaktion
Birgit Fischer, Köln
lebendesprachen@degruyter.com

Redaktionsrat 2022-2023
Marco Agnetta, Innsbruck University, Austria
Vahram Atayan, Heidelberg University, Germany
Ginette Castro, Temuco Catholic University, Chile
Nikolai K. Garbovskiy, Lomonosow Moscow State University, Russia
Thierry Grass, University of Strasbourg, France
Peter J. Holzer, Innsbruck University, Austria
Samuel Läubli, ZHAW Zurich University of Applied Sciences, Switzerland
Gina Abou Fadel Saad, Saint Joseph University, Beirut, Lebanon
Klaus Schubert, University of Hildesheim, Germany
Carsten Sinner, Leipzig University, Germany
Karolina Suchowolec, TH Köln - University of Applied Sciences, Germany
Tomás Svoboda, Charles University Prague, Czech Republic
Eva Wiesmann, Bologna University, Italy
Sue Ellen Wright, Kent State University, Ohio, USA
Ailing Zhang, Shanghai International Studies University, China

Lebende Sprachen is covered by the following services:

Baidu Scholar
BDSL Bibliographie der deutschen Sprach- und Literaturwissenschaft
BLL Bibliographie Linguistischer Literatur
Cabells Journalytics
CNKI Scholar (China National Knowledge Infrastructure)
CNPIEC - cnpLINKer
Dimensions
EBSCO (relevant databases)
EBSCO Discovery Service
ERIH PLUS (European Reference Index for the Humanities and Social Sciences)
Genamics JournalSeek
Google Scholar
IBR (International Bibliography of Reviews of Scholarly Literature in the Humanities and Social Sciences)
IBZ (International Bibliography of Periodical Literature in the Humanities and Social Sciences)
Ingenta Connect
J-Gate
JournalGuide
MLA International Bibliography
Naver Academic
Naviga (Softweco)
Norwegian Register for Scientific Journals, Series and Publishers
OLC Linguistik
Primo Central (ExLibris)
ProQuest (relevant databases)
Publons
QOAM (Quality Open Access Market)
ReadCube
ScienceON (Korea Institute of Science and Technology Information)
Scilit
SCImago (SJR)
SCOPUS
Semantic Scholar
Sherpa/RoMEO
Summon (ProQuest)
TDNet
Ulrich's Periodicals Directory/ulrichsweb
WanFang Data
WorldCat (OCLC)
X-MOL
Yewno Discover

Journal information

Additional information

eISSN:

1868-0267

ISSN:

0023-9909

Languages:

German, English

Publisher:

De Gruyter

Additional information

First published:

January 1, 1956

Publication Frequency:

2 issues per year

eISSN: 1868-0267

ISSN: 0023-9909

Audience(s) for this journal

translators, interpreters, linguists, philologists, lexicologists, terminologists and students of these fields

Safety & product resources

Manufacturer information:
Walter de Gruyter GmbH
Genthiner Straße 13
10785 Berlin
productsafety@degruyterbrill.com

Lebende Sprachen

About this journal

Your Benefits

History

Supplementary Materials

Topics

Lebende Sprachen

Overview

About this journal

Your Benefits

History

Ahead of Publication / Just Accepted

Issues

Special issues

Ranking

Submit

Editorial

Abstracting and Indexing

Supplementary Materials

Supplementary Materials

Topics

Topics

External Links

Bibliographic data