Subject collection: Linguistics (2,773 titles, 1967–2015)

This volume brings together cognitive psychologists, interpreting scholars and translation researchers, who look at the process phenomena involved in translation and interpreting (T/I) from various linguistic vantage points.

The focus is on methodology and the problems that loom large in a multidisciplinary discipline. The authors include Annette de Groot, Juliane House, Kirsten Malmkjaer and Miriam Shlesinger.

The topics discussed range from simultaneous interpreting, subtitling, translating in pairs, the sub-skills involved in T/I, to expertise and management issues.

Three major challenges emerge from T/I process research as it is portrayed in this book:

- How to maintain a clear vision of the object of study?

- How to ensure methodological sobriety?

- How to transfer the emerging knowledge of expertise to translation pedagogy?

Changing socio-political landscapes, the dynamics of ‘glocalisation’, among other factors, are spawning new policy attitudes towards multilingualism, and again putting language planning (LP) on the map – in a manner reminiscent of the 1960s and 1970s. With respect to terminology, this book suggests that to be relevant and sustainable, current LP would have to define its mission as the deregulation of access to specialised knowledge, and correspondingly be founded on substantially different methods and theoretical bases: epistemology and ontology of specialised domains; research on language for special purposes (LSP) and collocations; corpus linguistics; knowledge extraction and knowledge representation; language engineering technologies. On the one hand, the book recommends itself to decision-makers and language planning project managers. On the other, it should be of interest to students of LSP and terminology, language planning, concept and object theories, knowledge modelling, artificial intelligence, text and corpus management, translation process analysis, text and African linguistics.

Misunderstandings have been examined extensively in studies on cross-cultural (mis)communication which associate them with participants’ differing cultural backgrounds and/or linguistic knowledge. Drawing on a large corpus of misunderstandings from cross- and intra-cultural encounters, this book argues that miscommunication does not relate exclusively to participants’ background differences or similarities, but that its creation and development are tightly interwoven with the dynamic manner in which social encounters unfold. Against a backdrop of Pragmatics, Conversation Analysis and Goffman’s theory of frames and roles, the volume discusses a large number of misunderstandings and shows that they are associated with the constant identity and activity shifts as well as with the turn-by-turn construction of interpretative context in interaction. Besides students and researchers of pragmatics, conversation analysis and sociolinguistics, this book will also appeal to all those interested in the process of making, misinterpreting and clarifying meaning in social interaction.

This collection presents typological work on tense, aspect, and epistemic modality in a variety of languages and against the background of different schools of thinking, among which the St. Petersburg Typological School developed and so masterfully implemented by the Petersburg linguist, Vladimir Petrovich Nedjalkov. The volume honors this reputed scholar for his life work. It is in mainly this spirit (and the EUROTYPE spirit) that the following scholars have contributed to the volume: T. Tsunoda on Warrungu (Australian indigeneous language), L. Kulikov on Vedic, K. Kiryu on Japanese, Korean and Newari, N. Sumbatova on Svan (from the Kartvelian group), T.Bulygina & A. Shmelev on Russian, W. Boeder on Georgian, R. Thieroff on aorist and imperfect in European languages, Y. Poupynin on Russian, L. Johanson on Kipchak Turkic, I. Dolinina on Russian, N. Kozintseva on Old and Modern Eastern Armenian, Ch. Lee on Korean, W. Abraham on split ergative languages and German, G. Silnitsky on Russian, V. Plungian on Russian, E. Rakhilina on Russian, and K. Ebert on Kalmyk.

The Tibetan language comprises a wide range of spoken and written varieties whose known history dates from the 7th century AD to the present day. Its speakers inhabit a vast area in Central Asia and the Himalayas extending into seven modern nation states, while its abundant literature includes much of vital importance to the study of Buddhism. After surveying all the known varieties of Tibetan, including their geographical and historical background, this book concentrates on a phonological and grammatical description of the modern spoken Lhasa dialect, the standard spoken variety. The grammatical framework which has been specially devised to describe this variety is then applied to the written varieties of Preclassical and Classical Tibetan, demonstrating the fundamental unity of the language. The writing system is outlined, though all examples and texts are given in roman script and where appropriate, the International Phonetic Alphabet. The volume includes a comprehensive bibliography.

This collection of articles presents a variety of approaches to central phenomena in South Slavic syntax and semantics, with an informal introduction by the editors on South Slavic clause structure. Phenomena addressed (treated partly on a language specific basis, partly comparative) include: the structure of the functional field, verb fronting, clitic placement, conjunctions, noun phrase structure, possessives, agreement, and aspectual phenomena.

This volume brings together 11 original papers on a variety of themes in Greek linguistics, covering phonology, morphology, syntax, and semantics, both synchronically and diachronically.Collectively, these papers report on recent advances in the study of Greek grammar within the framework of generative grammar, and provide insights into such diverse topics as the analysis of consonant clusters, the representation of stress, the status of inflectional features, the relationship between compounds and projection, derived nominals, the occurrence of weak clitic pronouns in questions, small clauses, focus constructions, word order, the placement of clitics in Cappadocian dialects, and Medieval Greek relativisation strategies.

Together, they show that Greek is a vital contributor to issues of current controversy in grammatical theory.

Terms in Context applies the methodology that has been developed over the last two decades in corpus linguistics to the relatively new and still little developed field of corpus-based terminography. While corpora are already being used by some terminologists for the identification of terms and retrieval of contextual fragments, this book describes the first attempt to use corpora for terminography in much the same way as large general reference corpora are already being used for general language lexicography. The author goes beyond the standard problem of identifying terms as opposed to non-terminological lexical items in text and focuses on identifying metalanguage patterns which point to the presence in text of (parts of) reusable definitions of terms. The author examines these patterns and shows how the information which they contain can be retrieved and used as input for terminological entries.

Terms in Context should be of interest to ‘traditional’ terminologists who have not previously considered adopting a corpus-based approach to their work or at least not on the scale proposed here; to ‘modern’ terminologists who use text primarily for the identification of terms and the retrieval of contextual examples; to those in the corpus linguistic community who have hitherto used general language corpora for the purposes of lexicography and have not previously considered using special purpose corpora for more specific lexicography studies; and to academics in the ESP/LSP community who are interested in showing students how to use text as a means of ascertaining the meaning of terms.

This book breaks new ground in translation theory and practice. The central question is: In what ways are translations affected by text types? The two main areas of investigation are: A. What are the advantages of focusing on text types when trying to understand the process of translation? How do translators tackle different text types in their daily practice? B. To what extent and in what areas are text types identical across languages and cultures? What similarities and dissimilarities can be observed in text types of original and translated texts?Part I deals with methodological aspects and offers a typology of translations both as product and as process. Part II is devoted to domain-specific texts in a cross-cultural perspective, while Part III is concerned with terminology and lexicon as well as the constraints of mode and medium involving dubbing and subtitling as translation methods. Sonnets, sagas, fairy tales, novels and feature films, sermons, political speeches, international treaties, instruction leaflets, business letters, academic lectures, academic articles, medical research articles, technical brochures and legal documents are but some of the texts under investigation.

In sum, this volume provides a theoretical overview of major problems and possibilities as well as investigations into a variety of text types with practical suggestions that deserve to be weighted by anyone considering the relation between text typology and translation. The volume is indispensable for the translator in his/her efforts to become a “competent text-aware professional”.