Babel - Volume 46, Issue 2, 2000

The paper aims at exploring some of the conditions and ways in which LSP(Language for Special Purposes) adult learners perceive misleading vocabulary. Specifically, the paper represents an attempt to find out whether adult learners of English who know the meaning of certain words can or cannot work out the new meaning of phrases or collocation which would result from the combination of two or more words. on top of this, we will try to give reasons for the learners’ inaccurate guesses. The phrases and/or collocations used in this study were contextualised in sentences to show or mirror our learners’ ability in working out their collocational new meanings. To achieve this objective, two methods were followed. First, individual general words (not technical) were taught and then a combination of two or more of these words (to give specific meanings) was worked out by 80 LSP learners through context. Second, after testing the same learners in these words and grading their responses, both descriptive and inferential statistics were used to indicate both frequencies and statistical significance levels. The samples and teaching situation were taken from the Jordan University of Science and Technology. The study showed that JUST learners found difficulties in working out or guessing the specific meanings of phrases and collocations when combined to form new meanings though they knew the meaning of each word individually. These phrases look deceptively easy to our Arabic speaking LSP learners at first sight, but their meanings can be radically different from what our learners might expect. The study ends up with a number of practical teaching implications including paraphrasing and idiomaticity in the first place. Finally, some other research recommendations were suggested.

This article attempts to describe some of the pragmatic and semantic functions of two important punctuation marks. These are the semicolon (;) and the colon (:). The reason for this description is that no studies have provided a detailed description of the pragmatic and semantic functions of these marks. These marks are mostly used in Arabic for intonational or decorative purposes. It was found that the system of punctuation marks in Arabic is inadequate as it does not specify rules for using them. However, in this study, it was found that the punctuation marks have linguistic implications that are not recognized by linguists nor by translators. The implications discussed here are the emphatic, additive, contrastive, and substantiative functions.This article attempts to describe some of the pragmatic and semantic functions of two important punctuation marks. These are the semicolon (;) and the colon (:). The reason for this description is that no studies have provided a detailed description of the pragmatic and semantic functions of these marks. These marks are mostly used in Arabic for intonational or decorative purposes. It was found that the system of punctuation marks in Arabic is inadequate as it does not specify rules for using them. However, in this study, it was found that the punctuation marks have linguistic implications that are not recognized by linguists nor by translators. The implications discussed here are the emphatic, additive, contrastive, and substantiative functions.

The growing importance that present-day translatology affords the study of linguistic cliché has made it essential to reconstitute their archetypal status and reconsider their paradigmatic function. This will allow us to detect better how and why its transcoding corresponds perfectly whether in both superficial and profound structure, or merely in profound structure and at the expense of its phrasal realization: semantic, not morpho-syntactic synonymy. Indeed, while ‘díselo con flores’ demands, in English and French, an automatic transcoding from the archetype and the fixed syntagma that it represents, the translation of C. J. Cela ‘nos ha merengao’ demands a translatological performance not only of the code, but also of the register. So a common archetypal base determines an automatic translation of clichés only where the codes of the two languages have stigmatised the archetype with the help of the cliché itself. Otherwise, one has to search for how each language has recodified the said archetype. How? Why? This is, precisely, what we have attempted not only to resolve but to demonstrate.

This article analyzes the “cry from the heart” of Bertha Pappenheim through her German version of the Yiddish Memoirs of Glückl von Hamel and the renowned “female Bible” (Tsenerene). Involved here is the placing of this output in the framework of her private life — a somewhat hysterical one, winning her the name of “Anna O” in psychoanalytic literature — and in the context of her feminism and social activism (among other things, she was the head of a Jewish orphanage in Germany and an investigator of Jewish cultural values in Eastern Europe). Her work shows how a tradition of biblical commentary can inspire both vernacular creativity and sacred literalism — inventiveness in the sense of a creation of a new form of Yiddish called Taytshsprakh (“language of commentary”) and “interlineal literalism” in Walter Benjamin’s sense. Most particularly, Pappenheim’s work as translator brings out the proud nature of a Jewish response to Hitler and helps to define the field of Jewish translation.