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Advances in writing technologies have fostered the gradual move from Paper-Based (PB) to Computer-Based (CB) writing assessment in foreign language (FL) education. The trend was further boosted by the outburst of the Covid-19 pandemic, which led to drastic changes in teaching and assessment practices. In higher education (HE) contexts, writing assessment in English as a foreign language (EFL) is more and more often managed by means of online learning platforms, where students create and submit written assignments on the computer. This paper examines a sample of 100 EFL exam essays completed by 100 Italian university students. Half of the essays were computer-typed on Moodle from home during the Covid-19 lockdown, whereas the other half were handwritten on paper during a face-to-face exam session after the Covid-19 emergency. The study presented herein compares the amount and types of formal errors in the CB and PB written assignments respectively. The results of the comparison may be useful to suggest hypotheses on the impact that both writing modality and environment can have on the quality of EFL writing in assessment contexts.

In the mid 1920s, Virginia Woolf was engaged in a dispute with the American critic Logan Pearsall Smith on “the ethics of writing articles at high rates for fashion papers”. Harper’s Bazaar, a commercial magazine to which Woolf contributed four short stories between 1930 and 1939, was a feminine periodical that exploited modernism’s distinction and high cultural capital to captivate a sophisticated, but essentially middle-class, readership by selling the illusion of upward cultural mobility. Although Woolf referred to her high-quality contributions to Harper’s Bazaar as “pot boiling stories for America” written “to make money”, it seems clear that her own engagement with a middlebrow publishing venue did not in the least affect her reputation as a highbrow intellectual and was indeed typical of the multifaceted, reciprocal relationship between the magazine and high modernism in a context in which mobility also meant redrawing the boundaries between intellectual and popular culture. The publication of modernist content within the glossy pages of Harper’s Bazaar was advantageous to both modernists seeking to maintain their celebrity status and the periodical itself, which attempted to cultivate and sustain a refined audience. Much in line with her work of the 1930s, Woolf’s short stories engaged with social and ethical issues such as the righteousness of penetrating other people’s lives and innermost truths (“In the Looking Glass”), violence and decay (“The Shooting Party”), capitalism and antisemitism (“The Duchess and the Jeweler”), human and non-human worlds (“Lappin and Lapinova”). Though often considered as non-canonical in terms of both their rather prosaic plot as well as characterisation, and the commercial venue in which they appeared, the stories Woolf wrote for Harper’s Bazaar reflect the preoccupations of the last decade of her career and are indicative of the tensions between high and low in modernist culture.

This article reports the findings of a diachronic study of acknowledgement practices in 300 randomly collected research papers published during three different periods (1998, 2004 and 2012) in the most prestigious American and European astrophysics journals written in English. In order to investigate the influence of these practices on authorship patterns, we analyzed the distribution over time of a series of quantitative variables (number, length and types of acknowledgements, mean number of words/number of acknowledgements per research paper and mean number of acknowledgements/number of authors per research paper, number of named and unnamed acknowledgees, number of identified and anonymous referees, and number of emotionally charged-words). Comparisons between periods were carried out and Student’s t-tests were applied to the quantitative results. Our main findings show that acknowledgements are very common in astrophysics since they are present in 96% of the whole corpus. Financial, mainly public, and instrumental supports are the most frequently acknowledged categories. The number and length of acknowledgements and the mean number of words/number of acknowledgements per research paper grow over time. Financial, instrumental and conceptual assistance, unnamed individuals and anonymous referees increase over time, whereas moral, editorial and unclassified supports, named individuals and identified referees, and emotionally-charged words decline. If we focus on each journal publication context, we can observe that the research papers published in the American journals include more and longer acknowledgements, with a higher mean number of acknowledgements per author, more financial and instrumental supports, and a lower percentage of emotionally-charged words, whereas the European journals contain more conceptual and editorial supports. All these data can be understood in the frame of growing scientific professionalism, while a detailed cross-journal analysis may occasionally suggest honorary/guest/gift authorship.

This paper examines a corpus of 150 titles of research articles published between 2010 and 2013 in Anglo-American natural sciences journals (physics, chemistry and biology) in order to determine their lexical density and grammatical and morphosyntactic features. Towards that end, the frequency of present and past participles, prepositions, coordinating and subordinate conjunctions, and the frequency and length of compound words was recorded in each title. The total number of content and function words was also recorded so as to determine title lexical density. ANOVA tests were applied in order to assess whether statistically significant differences in the frequency of the above mentioned variables were detected within and across disciplines and in the whole corpus. Our results showed that, in the three disciplines, the frequency of the past participle is higher than that of the present participle (p = 0,04). They also disclosed that prepositions are the most frequently used function words and that they outnumber coordinating conjunctions (p = 0,02). Compound words were found to be very frequent, especially 2- and 3-word ones. As for title lexical density, it was found to be similar across disciplines (3,1). The only statistically significant cross-disciplinary difference detected was that present participles are more frequently used in chemistry than in biology (p= 0,001). Our findings reflect the complexity of the scientific concepts expressed in natural sciences research article titles. Because titles are frequently the only section of a paper scientists read so as to decide whether to read on or not, we present a few pedagogical tips that could be applied in reading and/or writing ESP courses. DOI: 10.20420/rlfe.2015.0012

This paper is part of a wider research project which studies the academic writing of the dental Hispano-American community. It aims to describe and to analyze which hedging strategies are used and for what purpose in 40 dental research papers published in Hispano-American journals (1 Venezuelan, 1 Cuban and 2 Spanish) between 1999 and 2005. The frequency of use of hedges in the different rhetorical sections of the dental papers is analyzed: introduction, method, results, discussion and conclusions. In addition, we compare the use of hedging strategies according to the section, journal and nationality. It was found that impersonal constructions and approximators predominated, followed by shields. However, deictics and the compound hedges reported less frequency. Introduction and discussion were the most heavily hedged sections. Nevertheless, hedges were also registered, mainly impersonal type, in method and results sections. Conclusion was the least hedged section. Shields, deictics and compound hedges were found mainly in the introduction and the discussion sections. On the other hand, approximators, shields and impersonal constructions were used in all the sections. The comparisons of our results show statistically significant differences in the use of hedges according to the rhetorical section, and the nationality; we also found differences between the frequencies of use of the five hedging strategies. Hedging is a very frequent strategy in the dental Hispanic RP; therefore, we propose its formal teaching in the dental academic writing courses.

This paper aims to present observations on the pragmaticalized use as well as the concomitant functions of the demonstrative este in Mexican Spanish. Este seems to serve an additional range of functions in Mexican Spanish in particular, but also in other Hispanic American varieties, as it has turned into a quite productive discourse marker that can be considered, among other things, as a hesitation element, an outline signal, and probably also as an evidentiality marker. The specific functional domains (especially with regard to possible evidential functions) will be illustrated in more detail in the paper using oral language data from the speaker community of the southern Mexican city of Oaxaca de Juárez. The study also includes a sociolinguistically oriented quantitative analysis, the results of which will also be discussed in the context of language ideological attitudes towards este.

Tourism communication, especially since the digital turn, has registered several attempts to open to new forms of multilingualism. For instance, the traditional multilingual experience offered by guided tours and audio guides has now been enhanced by social networking tools. Recent research points to the need of interdisciplinary work at the crossroads of linguistics, media sciences and museum studies to investigate communication strategies and linguistic devices by means of which an international audience of tourists can be addressed and get involved in museums in the digital age. The present paper illustrates the first findings of the project “Museo poliglotta”, a project run by two universities in the Italian towns of Bergamo and Brescia in cooperation with local museums with the goal of producing digital multilingual contents for international museum visitors. The empirical part of the paper describes a workshop activity in which students developed Instagram reels in Italian, German and English on the figure of the well-known Italian composer Gaetano Donizetti. A number of observations lead to the conclusion that synergies between language research and foreign language teaching on the one hand and museum institutions on the other can bring about important benefits for all parties involved, in particular the possibility to offer professionalising training in the academic world and stimuli to innovate and improve multilingual communication in the museum sector.

In the introductory article to this special issue, the two editors first provide a brief insight into how it arose and then give an overview of the contents of the individual papers, all of which are dedicated to phraseography or metaphraseography. These two fields of linguistic research belong to both phraseology and (meta-)lexicography and deal with the inclusion of phrasemes in dictionaries and the corresponding practical and theoretical issues. The articles also have in common that they focus on various diatopic Romance varieties spoken in Italy (Genoese, Trentino, Piedmontese, Tuscan, regional Italian of Rome, Sardinian, Catalan of Alghero), Croatia (Istriot), Spain and Latin America (regional varieties of Spanish). Since the term phraseme is used in a broad sense in this publication, numerous different phraseological categories are discussed in the papers, including, for example, syntagmatic verbs and partially lexically filled constructions, in addition to more classical categories such as idioms, proverbs and collocations. Finally, it will be briefly argued why this special issue, which is inspired by the two research projects GEPHRAS and GEPHRAS2, can be regarded as particularly innovative.

The provision of a translator’s paratext offers greater visibility to the translator and a direct source of information on his/her decisions and intentions. Osório de Oliveira, the translator of the Portuguese version of Defoe’s Robinson Crusoe, replaces the author’s original preface with one of his own in which he justifies the alterations to the original text, whilst underlining that it was a Portuguese vessel on its way to Brazil which saved the hero from his desperate plight. This paper proposes to examine the reasons for Oliveira’s emphasis on this particular episode, to the detriment of others which were unquestionably more interesting within the context of the hero’s adventures. The date of publication of the translation – 1940 – and consequently of the paratext, provides the principal key to the answer, as the ideology of the Estado Novo was founded on the exaltation of the Portuguese “Discoveries”, underpinning a colonial policy which supposedly justified the retention of the “Overseas Provinces”. The paper discusses the translator’s reasons for intervening in the target text, whilst attempting to evaluate how far the paratext may have mediated the reception of a final version in which the deeds of past heroes were exploited in an attempt to appropriate Defoe’s story.

Translation assessment is an activity present in many scenarios and the diverse individuals who must deal with it partly explains the variability of such activity. Previous Translation Studies have already profiled and compared both the behaviour and the results of assessments carried out by a variety of evaluators. This paper examines the main contributions concerning this issue, and adds to the field by distinguishing between the contexts in which evaluators carry out their usual work and other less paradigmatic situations. The result is a compendium of the characteristics defining the prototypical evaluator profiles as well as presenting a warning for researchers, professionals, students and teachers on the special conditions that, depending on the circumstances, affect their evaluation and make it look as a different activity. The discussion includes complex formulas characterized by the collaboration of different groups of evaluators, as well as of those whose profile is not defined always by a single role. Therefore, the present paper may serve as an inspiration for new research investigating the profiles of evaluators to open the focus and take into account the circumstances that may affect their alleged habitual activity.

This paper presents a pilot study of audioguides concerning paintings from museums in Italy, Germany and Denmark. The study combines an analysis of speech actions based on categories from the theory of Funktionale Pragmatik with a frame-oriented analysis of knowledge relevant for understanding the audioguide texts, which can be assessed from the formulation choices made by the authors. The focus of the paper is on building a descriptive and analytical tool to identify characteristics of German, Danish and Italian art audioguides. The aim of the study is to establish first results to be substantiated in future work also concerning the receiver modelling (Hörer:innen-Modellierung) in the investigated audioguides and furthermore to see whether intercultural differences are visible in the texts. The study shows that the same speech actions are present in audioguides from different cultures, but that they occur in different proportions according to the specific culture. Along similar lines, it was possible to create a consistent coding system concerning types of knowledge conveyed in the audioguides that enables us to assess and compare the results of analysing the texts. This analysis, too, indicates intercultural differences.

The present paper functions as an introduction to this special issue of mediAzioni, which brings together selected papers presented at the Translating Europe Workshop entitled "L'intelligenza artificiale per la traduzione verso una nuova progettazione didattica?" (3 December 2021), focusing on the pedagogical implications of Artificial Intelligence (AI), with a particular emphasis on Neural Machine Translation (NMT). The article revolves around three main themes. First, it considers the impact of emerging neural technologies on language services, redefining the traditional role of the translator and creating new responsibilities and tasks. Despite the considerable progress that NMT has made compared to previous models, it still has shortcomings that are almost "invisible" because they often lack clear grammatical or morphosyntactic marking. Such errors require a certain cognitive effort to identify, since they involve problems that are less obvious to the untrained eye, such as textuality or inadequacies at the level of discourse. Secondly, the article looks more closely at professional practices, especially those related to pre-editing, post-editing and proofreading. Particular emphasis is placed on the indispensable role of the human in translation workflows that integrate NMT not only at the level of post-editing and text revision, but also at the level of translation project management. Finally, the paper moves on to the implications of NMT for the training of translators and beyond, discussing key insights from the workshop participants regarding future teaching practices at university level. The article concludes by outlining the structure of this special issue and providing a brief synopsis of the collected papers.

Ad hoc corpora are considered effective to deliver native-like technical (and legal) translation. This paper explores how the translation of a system-specific document such as an Italian procura alle liti (power of attorney to appear in court) can be addressed. Translating this legal document may be problematic due to the fact that it is not recurrent in the common law system, which contemplates other types of special powers of attorney (PoAs). This paper explores whether and to what extent a corpus-based translation is possible when L2 parallel texts are difficult to find in native contexts. To this aim, a translation project with technical translators and lawyers is carried out. The participants compose an ad hoc corpus which they consult as a language reference tool. The paper findings report that the translators' corpus-based translation is mostly a word-by-word rendering of the source text, which may sound unnatural to an expert of the field. The lawyers' translation partly deviates from source words, but addresses the communicative function of the source text. The paper highlights the need for a balance between the two strategies, for example by focusing on textual functionality and/or paraphrasing, although at the cost of a reduced formulaicity.

Forensic Linguistics as a discipline has gone through more than 30 years of development in China, which can be divided into the brewing period, the establishment and development period, and the comprehensive improvement period. Scholars have presented the origin and development of forensic linguistics in the form of papers, monographs, translations, textbooks, seminars, conferences and other forms, which promotes the future development of forensic linguistics. In the past decade, the study of forensic linguistics has mainly focused on the theoretical research of forensic linguistics, the application of legislative and judicial language, the translation and teaching of legal language. This paper will adopt the method of literature research to summarize the origin and development of Chinese forensic linguistics in the past 30 years, and to anticipate the future development direction of forensic linguistics in the light of the current research characteristics and the hotspot of the times, so as to provide references for the theoretical development and application practice of current forensic linguistics, and to better guide future discipline development in China.

This paper outlines the construction of the KOMMA corpus and the presentation and analysis of selected case studies. The paper contains written and oral data from young adults attending the final year of a German-language high school in South Tyrol. In addition to describing the data collection and the methods used, the paper will also go into more detail about the data processing (transcription, normalisation, lemmatisation and POS tagging). Finally, some research results illustrate the usability of the corpus, with selected case studies from the field of word formation and lexis being presented.

This paper examines legal communication in Occupational Health and Safety (OHS) discourse and investigates the rhetorical strategies implemented at the height of the COVID-19 pandemic. To this end, the paper focuses on a dataset of legal provisions introduced as emergency legislation – measures adopted to tackle unprecedented circumstances – in Italy and the US, in order to identify commonalities and differences when informing the general public of the measures laid down particularly to protect workers in the workplace. This paper is intended to contribute to research in discourse analysis in OHS, an area of expertise which has been given fresh momentum since the onset of the pandemic. The decision to examine Italian and US emergency legislation was made in consideration of the cultural and legal differences between the two countries, which give rise to a number of discursive approaches to emergency management.

The ‘migration’ of concepts from one language to another, which takes place in cultural exchange, frequently gives rise to changes in the target language, primarily involving the lexical field. The reception of the Romanist legal tradition in China has led to the formation of a specialized lexicon which, along with the translation and production of Roman law-related works, has been subject to constant growth. This kind of terminological transposition has often resulted in the emergence in Chinese of more than one translatant for the same Latin word. As a concrete example of this phenomenon, this paper aims at providing a synoptical overview of the rendering in Chinese of the concepts of dolus and culpa, two legal institutions also largely connected to the field of commercial law. The sources analyzed from a diachronic and contrastive perspective range from the earliest manuals of Roman law published in China at the beginning of the twentieth century to recent documents, translated or directly composed in Chinese. More specifically, this paper will try to answer the following questions: what is the historical evolution of the main terms used in Chinese to express the concepts of dolus and culpa? What are the criteria adopted by Chinese translators/authors in choosing these terms? What are the main features and issues related to the linguistic rendering of the two legal institutions? As for the results of this study, attention will be paid to one of the peculiarities of the linguistic rendering of the concept of culpa, that is the use of two different translatants: guoshi 过失 and guocuo 过错. At the same time, another aspect on which this paper will shed light is the existence of a plethora of translatants related to the concept of dolus (qizha 欺诈, guyi 故意, zhaqi 诈欺, etc.). In this sense, on the one hand, it will be shown how the presence of multiple translatants is acceptable and useful when they are used to express the different shades of meaning conveyed by dolus and culpa that cannot be rendered by means of one single translatant for each of these two notions; on the other hand, this paper will highlight the necessity of a higher homogeneity and standardization of the Chinese Romanist lexicon.

From a semantic perspective the relation of concession can be defined as a specific type of contrast between two states of affairs, i.e. counterexpectative contrast, in which the conflict originates by the denial of an assumption, generated by the first state of affair or by the context. The semantic domain of concessivity has been investigated by a fair amount of studies that have explored the variety of connectives used to express concession in an Italian-Russian contrastive perspective (Biagini/Latos 2010; Biagini 2016; Biagini/Mazzoleni 2017; 2018). In this paper we focus on the Italian adverbial connective tuttavia and its Russian most frequent counterparts, i.e. odnako, tem ne menee and vsë že. The data are taken from the Italian-Russian and Russian-Italian parallel sub-sections of the Russian National Corpus. For our research we considered contemporary original texts (from 1945 until today) and we analyzed a total of 377 examples with their translations: 87 for tuttavia, 195 for odnako, 16 for tem ne menee and 79 for vsë že. The aim of this paper is to shed light on language-specific tendencies in relation to the semantic and textual expression of concession. The present Italian-Russian contrastive analysis, that exploits both qualitative and quantitative methods, investigates three different aspects: (a) the type of coding of the relation (full coding, undercoding or inferential bridging, in terms of Prandi 2004; 2006), (b) the syntactic distribution of connectives, and (c) the combination of connectives and punctuation (cf. Ferrari/Pecorari 2018; Pecorari 2019). Although interference can play a role in translation, we observed interesting differences in the data of the two languages. The results of the multi-perspective analysis show that Russian seems to assign a major semantic and textual relevance to the concessive relation than Italian, by using a richer semantic coding and by giving it a key role in the textual architecture.

The paper reviews Bulgarian conjunction bez da and Italian conjunction senza (che), introducing the subordinate clause with the relating to an unaccomplished action. The paper explores grammatical, syntactic, and semantic properties of these constructions in both languages. The similarity of semantic and functional potential of Bulgarian and Italian constructions as well as their intralingual specificity are shown.

Fixed lexical or syntactical expressions and formulae hallmark legal language. They serve both linguistic and legal purposes, and should be rendered accordingly in a target language and legal system. Most of the times, however, formulaic expressions are translated by resorting to calques, false cognates, or phrases that are uncommon in the target legal language (and legal system). This paper is aimed at exploring how and if corpus analysis can dispel doubts and help find acceptable translation candidates. As there are currently no publicly available legal corpora addressing corporate documents such as contracts and agreements, this paper wishes to bridge this gap by building and relying on an ad hoc corpus of authentic agreements written in English as a first language according to the laws of England and Wales. In this way, corpus evidence can help find equivalents and, possibly, address recurrent mistranslations from Italian into English. During the corpus analysis process, the paper shows and discusses search queries and how equivalents can be obtained. At the same time, it questions dictionary entries. The paper findings highlight that the consultation of the ad hoc corpus allows to find acceptable translations of Italian legal formulae and address recurrent mistranslations. English formulaic expressions, in fact, can be rendered satisfactorily thanks to the possibility of noticing word usages in context, keywords in contexts and collocations. Further research can encompass a wider variety of formulae and/or legal documents so that scholars and translators can be equipped with useful reference tools.

The aim of this paper is reporting an experience of theatrical translation that lies halfway between translation theory and practice. The project «Tradurre per la scena» is the result of a partnership between three institutions in the city of Bari – the Alliance française, the Kismet OperA theatre and the former Dipartimento di Lingue e Letterature Romanze e Mediterranee of the University. In 2008, a theatre translation team was formed at the University department to work on an Italian version of Olivier Cadiot’s Fairy Queen (P.O.L., 2002). The team thus confronted on the many problems posed in the play translation due to the author’s unbridled writing: diverse issues concerning rhythm, speed, voice, tone, wordplay, etc. Beyond the actual translation experience, the team participants had the opportunity to meet the directors and actors responsible for performing Cadiot’s text, but also to attend rehearsals and to make corrections to the translation prepared during the group translation sessions. The play, in fact, was not only represented on stage. The Italian text was published in a bilingual edition in a collection specifically created by the University department. The author of this paper believes that an illustration of this experience could be of interest to specialists in theatrical translation for several reasons: a) because it brings into play a wide range of cultural skills (linguistic, stylistic, dramaturgical, semiotic, pedagogical, etc.); b) because it constitutes one of the rare examples of collective translation, and moreover in a field that has been rather neglected by theoretical reflection; c) because it offers the rare opportunity to follow the ideally complete path of a foreign play from the stage to the publisher; d) because it closely examines the complexity of the relationship between the translator and the playwright, the actor, and even the author.

The present paper discusses necessary adaptations in research methodology to include Deaf Sign Language users in a survey on Sign Language interpreting. Prelingually Deaf Sign Language users have, on average, lower literacy levels than their hearing counterparts. Many of them disfavour reading and writing texts and prefer to be addressed with, and communicate in Sign Language. The present paper reports on a survey among hearing Sign Language interpreters and Deaf Sign Language users that included qualitative expert interviews and a questionnaire with multiple choice as well as free text answers. In total, the questionnaire was processed by 771 participants, 325 of whom are hearing Sign Language interpreters and 446 Deaf Sign Language users. The paper reports on how the data was collected among the Deaf participants including the use of Sign Language and Sign Language oriented Easy Language Plus in order to meet their communicative preferences. The paper is a contribution to the current efforts in Accessible Communication research to adapt methodology according to the participant’s communicative needs.

This paper deals with multimodal displays of non-affiliative stances and assessments in face-to-face triadic storytelling activities. Building on conversational analytical research that has highlighted the co-constructed nature of storytelling activities and the intersubjective nature of stance-taking, this paper takes a multimodal perspective and focusses on how interactants use language, prosody, gaze, and gestures to express stances that are non-affiliative to different degrees. The paper addresses two issues: We first concentrate on the ways that disaffiliative assessments and stances are communicated as multimodal packages before zooming in on the ways that storytellers and recipients deal with displays of disaffiliation. This includes both verbal and nonverbal strategies to highlight disaffiliation and interactional work to jointly mitigate it. By its focus on multimodal stance-taking in storytelling activities, the paper ties in with both the recently growing interest in the multimodal nature of stance-taking as well as recent pleas to revisit interactional storytelling from a multimodal perspective.

The book Multilingualism, Translation and Language Teaching, The PluriTAV Projec, edited by Juan José Martínez Sierra stems from the PluriTav Project funded by the Spanish Ministerio de Ciencia e Innovación and led by researchers at the Universitat de València, Universitat Jaume I, University College London, and the University of Roehampton. The book is divided into 13 chapters within two distinct parts. Part 1 consists of 5 chapters and presents the project rationale, the research and teaching context in which it emerged, its findings, and learning and teaching materials created by project members. Part 2 comprises 8 chapters, each of them featuring a research paper amongst the papers presented at the PluriTAV International Conference Multilingualism, Translation, and Language Teaching, which was held in Valencia, Spain, in 2019. The book is prefaced by an introductory chapter written by the editor and concludes with some final remarks.

Over the last two decades, the active engagement of learners through didactic Audiovisual Translation (AVT) in Foreign Language Learning (FLL) has been receiving increasing attention from both scholars and teachers. Most AVT modes — subtitling, dubbing, audio description (AD), subtitles for the deaf and hard of hearing (SDH) and voice-over — can be employed as didactic resources in FLL and guidelines are available for practitioners (Talaván, 2013, 2020). Empirical research has focused on the benefits of didactic AVT on individual and integrated language skills both in face-to-face and online contexts, English being the main language involved in the pedagogical tasks of most experimental studies (Lertola, 2019). Recently, a related long-term project, TRADILEX (Audiovisual Translation as a Didactic Resource in Foreign Language Education), led by the TRADIT research group at the UNED, has been funded by the Spanish Ministry of Science and Innovation. The main aim of TRADILEX is to evaluate the degree of FLL improvement in terms of communicative and mediation language skills thanks to the use of didactic AVT tasks. With this purpose, a carefully designed methodological proposal, which includes lesson plans on diverse AVT modes (i.e. subtitling, voice-over, dubbing, AD and SDH), is being piloted with B1 and B2 level English as a Foreign Language (EFL) learners in non-formal educational contexts, in university language centers all over Spain. Teachers play a key role in TRADILEX as they are specifically-trained facilitators of the learning process. Many teachers believe that AVT tasks could be integrated in the foreign language curriculum if proper teacher training is provided (Alonso-Pérez and Sánchez-Requena, 2018). However, it should be noted that teacher training has been largely neglected in the literature (Lertola, forthcoming). Within this context, this paper will present an online teacher training experience on didactic AVT carried out as a pilot study of TRADILEX, involving 12 FL secondary-school in-training teachers at a higher institution in Switzerland. The one-day teacher training was aimed at introducing future teachers to the pedagogical use of AVT tasks by presenting and working with both a dubbing and an AD lesson plan targeted for EFL B1 and B2 level respectively. The paper will analyse and discuss the data gathered through a feedback questionnaire completed by the participants, the assessment of their AVT tasks, and structured as well as non-structured observations. Observations were collected through two ad hoc observation rubrics (one per lesson plan) filled in by the one teacher-researcher and their lecturer as only-observing teacher, as well as from a group interview and personal notes on the experience shared by the subjects taking the course. The results of this small-scale study are encouraging and call for further in-depth analysis of the role of the didactic AVT in teacher training, both for practitioners interested in using it with their students and for FL teacher training courses in general.

The current paper reports on empirical evidence from TRADILEX, a project intended to develop a methodological proposal integrating different AVT modes to enhance communicative competence in the L2. To this end, a didactic sequence has been articulated with 15 lessons that will be tested with B1 and B2-level learners from Spanish universities. In this article, we present the results of the pilot study for the subtitling sequence. The participants were students of English Philology (B2) at the University of Jaen. Before working on the lesson plans, participants took an initial test of integrated skills to assess their language command of the L2. Once completed, they started the didactic sequence, consisting of six lesson plans. Finally, participants took a final test of integrated skills, whose results are compared with those obtained from the initial test. The preliminary conclusions of the pilot study confirm that the communicative competence and the translation skills of students were enhanced. Beyond verifying the impact of didactic AVT on the learning process, the paper offers a model for pilot testing that can be used in future studies on didactic AVT.

Reading is a highly complex cognitive process. From a neurobiological point of view, it involves at least six linguistic sub-competences including orthographic, semantic, syntactic, phonetic and prosodic competence. Each of these skills is required of the reader to extract different types of information from the text, ranging from the perceptual and the syntactic to the lexical and pragmasemantic one. Based on the main results of cognitive-oriented research on text and reading, this paper illustrates how prosodic competence, combined with formal coherence patterns, can be considered and employed as a reading strategy, enabling the reader to progressively grasp the meanings of a text. In the first part particular attention will be paid to the description of the syntax-prosody interface as well as of its function as a means of encoding of information structure in German. With regard to the teaching of German as a foreign language, the second part of the paper will present a method to train intonational reading. This approach aims to raise foreign language readers’ awareness of prosodic features of written texts and to introduce them to melodic patterns which can be encountered while reading. Such a practical training may prove to be advantageous, as the most typical and apparently “uncorrectable” errors committed by foreign language learners when speaking and reading German texts are almost always related to the domains of phonology and prosody.

Recent research on the impact and reception of science communication pointed out, that marginalized groups in society like people with mental or learning disabilities or people with limited language skills often remain unconsidered by conventional measures of communicating scientific content (Humm/Schrögel/Leßmöllmann 2020). Easy reading concepts might be a helpful approach to a more inclusive mode of science communication. The paper evaluates if German science institutions and universities offer easy reading versions on their websites to enable the above-mentioned groups to access fundamental scientific information. In a second step it analyses how these easy reading versions have been formally implemented and to what extent the requirements of the Federal Ordinance on Accessible Information Technology (BITV 2.0) have been followed. The paper aims to give a first overview on the efforts of scientific institutions to address marginalized groups and to point out deficits of these efforts.

The current paper presents an overview of phonostylistic devices (alliteration, assonance, rhyme, onomatopoeia) most commonly used in slogans and taglines of the modern car industry. The advertising slogan, being limited by space and time, is viewed as an important part of any marketing campaign. In a similar manner to previous studies, this paper confirms that a slogan is an effective type of storytelling for brands. However, it differs from the tagline, which is supposed to be long lasting. In an endeavour to convey some characteristics or information about the product and make it memorable for the consumer, brand designers resort to various linguistic devices that make the advertising language effective. The analysis of commercial advertising slogans and taglines demonstrated that such phonological devices as assonance and rhyme are infrequent, while alliteration is the most productive sound technique. As for onomatopoeia, it appeared to be the rarest device in the analysed bulk of slogans and taglines. The obtained results show the capacity of these sound techniques to enhance brand image. Numerous examples provided in the paper are tailored to support this statement. Moreover, the paper addresses the issue of sound symbolism, since the interest in its manifestation in marketing is on the rise. Thus, from a phonosemantic vantage point, the most productive phonemes are sibilants, plosives and sonorants. Their recurrent character contributes to the creation of a brand image. The overall results may have significant implications for marketing teams that seek to create ear-catching and memorable slogans and taglines as well as shed light on the consumer’s psychology.

The fields of Italian finance and economics are particularly rich in the use of English loanwords, as both non-adapted and adapted Anglicisms can be retrieved in general Italian monolingual dictionaries. If we consider the specific case of audiovisual translation, it is possible to observe an increasing use of Anglicisms in the Italian dubbed versions of audiovisual products set in the world of finance. Firstly, this paper will analyze the case of the first season of Devils (2020), a financial thriller drama television series. The analysis will investigate the translation strategies used to transpose the specialized financial terminology used in the dialogues, focusing in particular on the significant presence of new Anglicisms in the target text. Secondly, the presence of these Anglicisms in the Italian dubbed version of the film The Big Short (2015) will be analyzed, in order to compare their use in both productions. Finally, the paper ends with a practice-based interlingual study involving a number of Italian undergraduate students in Economics, aiming at establishing whether they use the new Anglicisms identified in the Italian dubbed version of Devils.

The paper focuses on time marks that may be detected in common law agreements and the translation issues they imply. In the first section, the author discusses the relation between time and law. The legal time governs the social time, as it ensures order and security. If memory is the manifestation of the legal past, the promise is the expression of the legal future. Depending on the legal culture taken into account, the legislator’s time may be more or less important than the time of the judge. The second section of the paper deals with time avatars that may be identified at the macrotextual level. The contract is understood as a promise that becomes obligation. The legal time is also expressed in contracts by the predictive capability of the parties, its acceleration and backwardness, its finiteness. The last section is an analysis of the translation of terms, collocations and metaphors expressing time in common law contracts.

In this paper, it is proposed on the basis of data from German that some of the information-structural features encoded by the projections located in the clause-internal Split-CP domain in the Rizzian (1997) model are replicated in the so-called “outer left periphery”, i. e. in the area situated above ForceP. In doing this, I pursue a cartographic approach in which information structure is directly represented in the syntax by means of syntactic heads that project within the clausal left periphery. The main claim of the paper is that the outer left periphery (of German) includes dedicated projections for four classes of topics, namely so-called “Contrastive Hanging Topics”, “Aboutness Contrastive Topics”, “Familiar Hanging Topics” and “Frame-setting Hanging Topics”. The observations made in this paper pave the way for a comparison with other languages, as well as for the question of the universality of this clause-peripheral makeup.

Several are the European Directives dedicated to e-commerce, focussing on consumer rights, the distance marketing of consumer financial services and the protection of consumers indistance contracts.In contract law, the terms “termination”, “withdrawal”and “cancellation”have peculiar and distinct meaning. Nonetheless, they tend to be misused and applied interchangeably. This article will shed light on these relevant terms in thelight of EU Directives on the protection of consumer rights in off-premises and distance contracts.To do so, it will first present instances in which the meaningand use of these terms is either clear-cut or somehow blurred. By analysing word usage and meaning in context, it will explore how EU Directives, and EU drafters in general, made(un)ambiguous distinctions. Then, it will investigate whether English-speaking drafters (such as those of the pre-Brexit UK, Ireland and Malta) made a consistent use ofsuch terms. Finally, this paper will explore whether online conditions of sale writtenin English by non-English speaking sellers or traders (such as Italian and Polish) also make a consistent use of the terms.The paper findings highlight that the use andlegal purpose of these terms in European Directives have not been particularly consistent over the years. Furthermore, Member States’system-specificity has weighed on the meaning, application and scope of the terms. On the other hand, at EU level the absence of a unique legal system of reference and the challenges of harmonization may have created false equivalences.

This paper mainly discusses the distribution and rhetorical functions of personal pronouns in English and Chinese legal news reports which is divided into two narrative types, the objective and the semi-dialogic. Through the comparative analysis of some English and Chinese legal news texts in the two types, it finds that the differences in narrative type directly affect the distribution of personal pronouns. In objective narrative, the use of third person pronouns accounts for an absolute proportion, and the frequency of using first person and second person pronouns is close to zero. In semi-dialogic narrative, the use of third person pronouns is still the highest, but only slightly higher than the use of first person and second person pronouns, accounting for only a small number. After analysis, this paper holds that there are three reasons for the uneven distribution: first, the differences between the dialogic style and the narrative style; second, the legal narrative being a story narrative; third, the specific restrictions on the use of legal rhetoric.

Formalization of natural language metaphors is a notorious problem in artificial intelligence and in other overlapping domains. It is semantic vagueness that makes metaphors resistant to formulaic or algorithmic descriptions. Great effort has been invested into modeling metaphors computationally but the issue remains methodologically uncertain and needs further research. This paper works on a practical solution to the problem how metaphorical meaning can be represented in a way suitable for computation. The research agenda of this paper is interdisciplinary; it brings together an algebraic heuristic-driven theory for metaphors developed in artificial intelligence and an applied theory of meaning that comes from cognitive linguistics. This agenda postpones theoretical speculation and argument and is solely solution-focused, which contributes to the value of this paper’s attempt to bridge the cognitive science disciplines whose compatibility, though declared, is seldom demonstrated in a piece of practical research. This paper works with metaphors of human emotions that are linguistically manifested in modern English discourse. Emotions by virtue of their ineffability as qualia are rich in metaphorical conceptualizations and serve the research agenda well. This paper in a meaningful way exposes and ranks designated properties of the FEAR, SADNESS, HAPPINESS, and RELAXATION/SERENITY concepts and arranges these properties into general-purpose ontologies that explicitly specify metaphorically preferred emotion conceptualizations and are good candidates for computation. In prospect, this paper will account for some theoretical aspects of the research and probe the algorithmic and repetitive nature of schemas that license metaphorical expressions in natural language.

It is generally assumed that a good knowledge of the legal field is a prerequisite to deliver legal translations. This paper will challenge this assumption by presenting a case study with third-year bachelor’s students who participated in a translation project. The students, enrolled in a course in translation practice, were trained in corpus consultation at the beginning of the academic year. Nearly at the end, they translated an extract of a supply contract without being trained in the legal field. They consulted a pre-compiled offline corpus and online bilingual dictionaries. The paper findings highlight that knowledge of the legal field would have certainly helped the students make more informed decisions and avoid some mistranslations. However, the major shortcomings were actually due to ineffective corpus or dictionary consultation. In particular, formulaic expressions and collocations were neglected. In light of the paper findings, it can be speculated that in translation training, effective corpus consultation may help users deliver high-quality legal translations. It also seemed that thorough knowledge of the legal field is not a prerequisite, at least as far as short texts are concerned.

This paper explores the concept of legal translation as a Third Space through the lens of the ‘multilingual’ Court of Justice of the European Union (ECJ). In many ways legal translation at that Court fits readily with the characterisation of translation as a Third Space. Due to complex internal production processes the ECJ produces texts which are undoubtedly hybrid in nature, and which exhibit distinctive features on a lexical and textual level marking them out as a product of cross-fertilisation of influences from source and target languages and legal cultures. Even the teleological approach taken towards legal reasoning at the ECJ occupies a space outside the strict confines of the texts involved. Both the processes and the product of the ECJ’s language system appear to bear all the hallmarks of translation as a Third Space. However, translation at the ECJ also challenges the concept of a Third Space. The prevailing definitions of translation as a Third Space fail to effectively conceptualise additional nuances of the specific nature of drafting and the complex nature of translation at the ECJ. This paper uses original empirical data to demonstrate that translation at the ECJ places constraints on the undefined, vague and fluid nature of the Third Space, warping the forces at work within that space. In this regard, rather than an amorphous space, the Third Space is better thought of as a determinate area which is delimited by elements of translation process which constrain it. This adapted framing of the Third Space can consequently be used to better understand and illustrate the dynamics at play in other areas of legal translation where the current concept of the Third Space is equally inadequate for encompassing the specific nature of translation practices which impact on that space-in-between.

This short paper maintains a discussion on the nature of rhotic consonants in two different but genetically related languages (Ukrainian and Russian). The main goal of the paper is carrying out a modern acoustic study about rhotic realizations in the two target languages, as well as putting forward some considerations about a possible sound change. Acoustic analysis is carried out using LPC and FFT measurements in order to capture the difference in rhotic realizations. The results allow for a description of the acoustic properties of the Ukrainian language, and suggest the existence of an ongoing simplification process of rhotic consonants in both languages.

In recent years, there has been growing interest in studying translators in the workplace. However, the rights of translators are an uncharted area. The objectives of this paper are twofold. First, it studies translators’ perceptions of translator rights in the workplace. Second, it develops a translator rights model inventory that compiles practitioners’ viewpoints for studying and measuring translator rights. This paper presents findings from a questionnaire survey that collected both quantitative and qualitative data from 155 translation practitioners in Greater China (mainland China, Hong Kong and Taiwan). The findings suggest that the translators attach the greatest importance to rights related to working conditions, followed by rights related to economic and social position, and finally those related to copyright issues. It was found that the translators are quite dissatisfied with the rights they have in the workplace, because what they wish to enjoy is much less than what they expect. In addition, a translator’s social variables, such as age, level of education, major field of study, and years of translation experience, are not related to the number of rights the person enjoys in the workplace. What was found to be related is the sex of the translator and region in which the translator lives.

This paper aims to illustrate and analyse the incidence of foreign words inherent to the special language of fashion in the Vocabolario domestico del dialetto foggiano (1929) by Carlo Villani (Foggia 1855 - Naples 1931). Although it has been published during the Twenties, a period notoriously hostile to dialects, the vocabulary follows the Gentilian cultural climate, well-disposed towards the works of enhancement of local linguistic heritage, which, especially for school, reach their peak in the 1920s. Furthermore, the vocabulary is the latest heir to a municipal and family lexicographic tradition, which flourished in the mid-nineteenth century, on the model of Basilio Puoti’s Vocabolario domestico napoletano e toscano. However, if the forerunner Saggio di vocabolario familiare (1841) follows Puoti’s purist thought, explicitly criticizing foreign words, the Vocabolario domestico del dialetto foggiano lemmatises them by showing their productivity in local speech; it provides interesting information for the history of language and customs at the same time (as can be seen from the glossary offered in this paper, properly commented). Nonetheless, this tolerance seems confined to the dialectal speech only: the translations proposed are mostly hyperonyms or words characterised by a greater semantic extension, which sacrifice the more precise semantic of the original forms, while compromising the memory of the referent.

Dubbing has been the dominant modality for conveying foreign media productions in Turkey for several decades. In the chain of dubbing translation, by the time the process is completed, there is a varied group of people from translators to voice actors, editors, and dubbing specialists that play a role in the many-sided process of dubbing. With the aim of reaching an impeccable outcome, the steps of dubbing (script and timing, casting, recording, editing) must be completed in a harmonious way. Some studies have been conducted on dubbing in Turkey in terms of translation quality (Sayman), censorship (Okyayuz), and translation strategies (Tekin); however, non-translation issues such as the performance of voice actors have not been explored. This paper offers further insight into the process of dubbing by distributing a survey to ten voice actors to evaluate the impact of translation on their end during the voicing process, their attitudes toward translators, and the translation along with their expectations from translators. Upon compiling the responses from the professional voice actors, the data is analyzed and discussed togain a better understanding of the process. The results indicated that the voicing process is mainly affected by the quality of translation and that there are challenges that arise from it. Therefore, to some extent, voice actors also intervene in the translated dialogues while recording. Overall, the end product, which is the translated dialogues, represents not only the work of the translator but also the voice actors.

The issue of neutral Spanish in literary translation has given rise to numerous statements and representations on its implications and its status within the Spanish language and the Spanish-speaking publishing market. This paper reviews the current state of knowledge with a double purpose: 1) to describe the previous studies on neutral Spanish, with a particular emphasis on the characteristics of neutral Spanish in literary translation, as well as on its methodology and the results obtained to this date, in order to systematize the research efforts on the subject of study; and 2) to connect said results (primary sources) with the representations on the artificiality and language impoverishment associated with neutral Spanish (secondary sources) in order to observe to what extent the former support the latter

We start from the observation that language pairs like Polish and English display an intriguing asymmetry: Polish has the structural resources to express grammatical gender in nouns while English predominantly leaves these under-determined. Therefore, a speaker of English can conventionally say “I am a nurse” irrespective of the speaker’s gender, while in Polish male/female/non-binary speakers would likely use variable forms. This asymmetry leads to nuanced translation choices which this paper aims to explore. Based on a newly compiled corpus of English-to-Polish Netflix subtitles – amounting to 3.5 million words – we examine how 113 different occupation-related feminatives are deployed by translators. We address three main research questions (RQ1-RQ3). RQ1 is about the frequency of the relevant feminatives in our corpus. RQ2 deals with how the feminatives are distributed across the 284 productions analysed in the dataset. Finally, RQ3 addresses the relationship between the frequency of feminatives in Netflix subtitles and the acceptability of these feminatives, as judged by speakers.

At the end of the 19th century, translations of French Parnassian, Decadentist and Symbolist poetry introduced the models for literary change into the Hispanic world. The first poems translated in Spain from Maurice Rollinat's Les Névroses (1883), published in the magazine La Diana, directed by the poet Manuel Reina, are to be found in this context. This paper examines these translations, carried out jointly by Aniceto Valdivia and Manuel Reina, and analyses which elements of the new French poetics are rewritten to establish the role of these translations in the fin-de-siècle literary renewal.

Furio Ceriol’s El concejo y consejeros del príncipe is one of the most widespread dissertations about the theory of the state in Europe during 17th century. In the Polish-Lithuanian Commonwealth this exposition had three translations and five editions between 1595 and 1646. All of them are located in the Catholic sphere and their authors were favorable to the reinforcement of royal power. The translators modified and commented on the text to adjust it to their political intentions, or they presented it accompanied by other works that completed its meaning. This paper aims to highlight the translation and editing strategies used in the various interpretations of this treatise.

Abstract Misinformation, disinformation, and fake news are available across diverse media, causing distrust in governmental and health institutions. In this context, the use of language has been of great interest in research, specifically in health communication, on social media, and in traditional news media. Our aim is to analyse and compare how the successive doses of the COVID-19 vaccine have been presented in different forms of knowledge communication, namely scientific research papers and the media, including online magazines and newspaper articles. By focusing on frequency, collocates, and phraseology of booster and dose, we trace differences in how boosters are presented in both lay and professional contexts of communication. Scientific discourse shows a marked preference for the more neutral and cautious term dose, which is also associated with the description of administration procedures. News discourse is characterised both by a higher incidence of the word booster (implying a reinforcement of an already existing immunity) and by the choice of referring to the institutional voices recommending vaccines. Results shed light on how different discourses manifest their perceived functions through lexical choice, as well as how news discourse uses and reinterprets scientific discourse in the light of what is relevant to the audience.

Abstract The present study focuses on how the COVID-19 crisis was dealt with and represented in newspaper articles in the period January 2020-February 2022. To this end, a corpus of articles was compiled from the Times using Sketch Engine (https://www.sketchengine.eu/), in order to manage and investigate the corpus quantitatively; discourse and genre analyses were applied for the qualitative approach. After providing a definition of the coronavirus timespan and the term crisis, the paper explores how the language used changed over successive periods of crisis management and communication (Coombs 2010). It also shows how the unpredictable development of the pandemic had an effect on communication flows, which in turn affected how the crisis unfolded. Different types of information were conveyed through the media that played a crucial role in selecting what to convey (and what not to convey) to the readers and how to represent it. This significantly contributed (and continues to contribute) to the development of the readers’ opinions and sentiments, fuelling their worries and feelings of uncertainty, weakness and risk (Denti 2021; Wodak 2021). Future research will focus on metadiscursive features and the changes in rhetorical persuasion (Hyland 2005), and on the politicisation of the crisis (Musolff et al. 2022; Thielemann and Weiss 2023).

Abstract Starting from the assumption that “(t)he worldwide COVID-19 pandemic in 2020 has monopolised news reports and public discussion in traditional media and on social media” (Dynel 2020, 2), this paper explores the relevance memes have had in the COVID-19 emergency (Giordano and Marongiu 2021a; 2021b). Memes represent the vernacular discourse of netizens, or user-created derivatives produced by Internet users belonging to the participatory culture (Shifman 2014), otherwise deemed as netlore (Sánchez 2019), a kind of folklore comprising humorous texts and art. Internet memes, as a virus, have a high power of replication (Wiggings 2019). This work looks at how virtual platforms became the space for social participation on the pandemic debate. In particular, proand anti-vaccine memes were a way to cope with the stressful times throughout the period 2020-2021. A corpus of static online memes in English is investigated to ascertain how the treatment of the disease and the vaccine issue are framed figuratively, both verbally and visually, through the use of metaphors, similes, intertextuality, and other rhetorical features. Memes are considered as examples of Netlore, or digital contemporary folklore aimed at adapting to life in the new normal.

Abstract The first lockdown had a positive impact on alcohol consumption, with wine becoming the most commonly consumed alcoholic beverage. Although the belief that the immune system and viral resistance are boosted by alcohol was labelled as ‘myth’ by the World Health Organization, a later study gave evidence that red wine drinking provided protection from COVID-19 1. Based on these premises, this paper embraces a multi-disciplinary approach combining sentiment and corpus-assisted discourse analysis to explore news readers’ reactions to the news story as divulgated by the Daily Mail in a corpus of 454 online comments. Findings indicate that sarcasm and distrust are the most frequent feelings, along with a mainly negative sentiment associated with discourses concerning politics, the effectiveness of various substances in combating the virus and wine-making traditions. Also, insights into the role of readers’ role in affecting editorial policies are drawn.