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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.

This article analyses Italian illustrated editions of Little Women published between 1908 and 1945. After an overview of the publishing history of the novel in Italy, the paper will examine Italian illustrations as hermeneutic tools in order to examine their ideological function in the representation of gender. The belated reception of Alcott’s novel in Italy, caused by its representation of a nonconformist educational model for girls, is mirrored in the tension between the nationalistic drive and the influence of foreign models that can be pinpointed in the illustrated editions. By analyzing adaptations of American illustrations, original Italian creations, and omissions of iconic illustrations, this paper will unveil how much the visual element is embedded in the Italian historical and cultural context, as the choice (or omission) of particular images impacted the interpretation of the book. By examining the Italian editions of Little Women published in this time frame, we will also be able to retrace the links with the American illustrated history of the book and bear testimony to the powerful impact of the 1934 film version on printed editions.

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.

Thesis Papers in Progress

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 Research paper examines how Tolkien's novels, "The Hobbit" and "The Lord of the Rings," incorporate labyrinthine elements into their fictional worlds. In these literary works, events primarily unfold in open landscapes, but there are elements that evoke complex and dangerous mazes, where certain heroes assume roles similar to that of Theseus. Thus, this analysis explores the representations of the Labyrinth myth through Tolkien's writing, highlighting both the similarities and differences between these structures in the two contexts, while emphasizing the symbolism of the subterranean world, akin to a cave, as a site of transformation where heroes emerge metamorphosed, invoking both death and rebirth. The paper suggests the use of mythocriticism to analyze the reiterations and variations of Labyrinth mythemes in these novels.

The role of Content and Language Integrated Learning (CLIL) in bilingual education has been an object of debate in European countries. On the one hand, it is commonly agreed that CLIL lessons stimulate interest in language through content; on the other, several problems and insecurities about the concrete implementation of this methodology emerge through teachers' surveys and questionnaires. In particular, the most predominant issues concern the difficulties that subject teachers face due to their inadequate language level. This affects both teachers and learners, and becomes a substantial obstacle, especially when dealing with the specialised technical vocabulary of scientific subjects. This paper specifically examines the challenges that CLIL primary and secondary school teachers face in Italy, with a particular focus on their language competence. As well as shedding light on the linguistic difficulties faced by CLIL teachers, this article propounds the integration of translanguaging practices to overcome these challenges. Indeed, by going beyond the existence of limited boundaries among languages, translanguaging allows a higher degree of freedom of expression and self-confidence for both students and teachers. The paper starts contextualising CLIL within the European and Italian framework, examining the most important policy recommendations to better understand the acknowledged importance of this methodology and the role it plays in implementing the principles of plurilingualism and multilingual education. Second, a survey of research, giving voice to CLIL teachers, analyses the most commonly perceived difficulties they face in the teaching process. Third, it suggests the integration of translanguaging into CLIL methodology, overcoming the concept of conventionally defined linguistic boundaries.

This paper focuses on the descriptive acts of sex and intimacy on the contemporary British stage as written texts and spoken words. The paper will specifically be exploring the use of language in Katherine Chandler’s Lose Yourself (2019) and Anna Jordan’s Freak (2014). Both of these play texts use language to describe in varying detail the intimate acts that the characters are recounting, some violent, some messy, some simply underwhelming, but it is solely the description of the acts that the audience are party too. The article refers to extracts from the published texts as well as critic responses of the performances, and apply theories from George Rodosthenous’s collection of essays, Theatre As Voyeurism (2015), exploring the acceptance of audio and visual voyeurism on stage, and Lisa Fitzpatrick’s Rape on The Contemporary State (2018) with regard to the issues that arise when performing violent sexual acts on stage. By using these critical texts and relating the author’s theories to my chosen performance texts, I argue that by using the description of the sexual acts, rather than overtly performing them, the intimate, aural connection that occurs between the performer and the spectator can be greater than the visual. As society seems to continuously change its mind about what is and is not acceptable to portray on stage, is the aural description of sexual and intimate acts bridging the gap of censorship, putting the ownership on the spectator’s imagination, rather than the performers’ interpretation?

This paper focuses on a recent shift in the adaptation of taboo language and content that has been happening over the last few years in the dubbing and subtitling of audiovisual content for the entertainment industry. While previous research on the cross-cultural adaptation of taboo language and subjects has pointed out that blatant examples of manipulation and censorship often occurred in dubbed and subtitled dialogue, this paper argues that recent changes in the distribution of audiovisual content – such as the global presence of streaming and on-demand platforms and an increased awareness from audiences – now tend to make it less likely for major cases of cross-cultural taboo manipulation to happen without going unnoticed or generating pushback. By looking at the cases of Netflix and Amazon Prime Video, the paper argues that the paratextual information available on the interfaces of streaming platforms – in the form of extra-textual tags and content advisories – reframes taboo content for global audiences in a less invasive way when compared to the heavy-handed, textual manipulation that was common in dubbing and subtitling in the age of (exclusively) linear TV. Examples from the Netflix and Amazon Prime Video English- and Italian-language interfaces are provided to support the idea that in these cases cultural and linguistic localization can play a crucial role in adapting taboo content for global audiences and in affecting their viewing choices.

This paper focuses on sex-related metaphors in two TV series, Sex and the City (1998-2004) and Sex Education (2019-2023). Although there are major differences between the two series, both are popular and successful TV series and were, at the time they were released, considered as transgressive and progressive when tackling the taboo topic of sex. Although it has been receding, it nevertheless remains a partially taboo topic that characters speak of by means of X-phemisms (Allan and Burridge 1991; 2006). After a brief study of the use of literal language (using WMatrix5, Rayson 2009), this paper focuses on metaphorical X-phemisms, as metaphor arguably is the most prominent mechanism of lexical semantic change and is a particularly productive tool when creating new euphemisms to mention taboo topics (Crespo Fernández 2006a; 2008; 2015). The study seeks to determine whether the conceptual sex metaphors in Sex and the City and Sex Education reflect the perceived differences in the conceptualisation of sex in the two series, since Sex Education has been argued to be more inclusive. 66 occurrences were collected in the first two seasons of Sex and the City and 68 in the first two seasons of Sex Education (MIP, see Pragglejaz group 2007. The metaphorical expressions were then classified according to the source domain with which the correspondences are established (CMT, see Lakoff and Johnson 1980). The results are similar in the two TV series. The main conclusions that can be drawn are that even if there is some evolution in the language of sex in general, the source domains used for sex-related conceptual metaphors are so deeply anchored in our cognitive systems that dysphemistic, violent, dehumanising metaphors undergo very slow change.

This thematic issue collects a selection of the linguistic papers presented during the interdisciplinary conference Parità, genere, disabilità: la prospettiva giuridica e la prospettiva lingui-stica (‘Equality, gender, disability: the legal and linguistic perspective’) held in October 2021 at the University of Milan. The papers deal with the inclusive languages of social sustainability, and in particular, six focus on the topic “language and gender” and one on “language and disability”, mainly in German and Italian and partly in other languages. Both topics are analysed in the standard language and/or in specific domains of use (i. e., legal communication and institutional communication).

This paper presents a case study on the teaching of a 30-hour module of English Linguistics for two courses in the first-cycle degree programme in Modern Cultures and Languages. Data gathered through students’ evaluation forms have been contradictory: the module scored high as far as students’ satisfaction was concerned but it scored low regarding interest. This paper shows how students’ feedback has helped us introduce changes. These are illustrated in the main part of this paper. They engage with pedagogical knowledge, methodologies and practices, as well as linguistic approaches specifically chosen to unpack the potential of the content of the module, improving students’ language awareness and language skills.

This paper examines from a codicological and bibliographical point of view the manuscript M-139 of the Menéndez Pelayo Library (Santander, Spain). The aim is to provide new information on the materiality of the codex while linking the study of the material and content of the manuscript, in order to draw conclusions about its configuration. After the identification of the manuscript, the contents are explained in detail. The material aspects are then dealt with, from the composition and markings of the paper, through the systems of arrangement to a brief paleographic analysis.

In this paper it will be analyzed grammatical and dialectal aspect of structural sentences of Albanian language used in six Kosovo Police Communication Centers. This paper includes: types of sentences used in Communication Centers separately; enhancing sentences, declarative sentences, declarative-exclamatory sentences and declarative-imperative; imperative sentences; - affirmative and negative sentences. All sections of this paper are illustrated with tables and charts, including number of used sentences and percentage of usage, to present the current situation of use of structural types of sentences in the Kosovo Police Communication Centers. Based on the results from six Communication Centers, which we have analyzed and treated separately, we have come to conclusions of the analysis of the grammatical and dialectal aspects. In Kosovo Police Communication Centers, within the category of declarative sentences, we find positive and negative sentences, which are formed by positive and negative particles, as: Poziiv (Positive), Negativ (Negative), Negativ niher (Negative for now), Po (Yes), Jo (No), veç çka po vrehet n’pamje t’jashtme (only what can be seen from outside), etc. In six Kosovo Police Communication Centers, the affirmative sentences are mainly formed through affirmative particles, as: pozitiv (positive), pranim (copy), po, po – po (yes, yeas – yes), u ba (done), ani faleminderit (OK thank you), n’rregull (alright), e kjart osht n’rregull (it’s clear alright), u kry (done), etc.

This paper deals with the incidence of communication channels treatment during court proceedings in a multilingual context like Cameroon. On the one hand, I will defend on the one hand the idea according to which the unbalanced treatment enshrined in the constitution, which confers preferential treatment to the so-called official, but imported languages and a marginal role to other local languages termed as national as well as other means of expression, affects the communication before courtrooms. The use of the former is reserved for an elitist minority group while that of the latter for a majority illiterate group. On the other hand, there has been an effort on the part of the state to curb this discrimination through the linguistic assistance. But still, there are challenges that confirm the legitimate fears of litigants, better lay-litigants of violation of their rights of access to justice and fair trial at large. The paper then suggests to the State to enhance the promotion of national languages, to emphasize on the training of judicial personnel and public awareness.

One of the most important goals of foreign language teaching is to enable students to use the target language in everyday situations. Developing lexical competence in foreign language learning can play an important role in achieving this goal. The aim of the present study is to call attention to the importance of teaching collocations in foreign language education. The first part of the paper gives an overview about collocations and collocational competence. In the second part of the paper, I would like to focus on principles of phraseology and foreign language teaching methodology that can be used for teaching collocations in the classroom.

Keen observers of Kenyan English usage will agree that idiomatic expressions such as put into consideration, rather than take into consideration, are certainly common in daily usage. The author of this paper set out to establish if that was indeed the case by having a sample of 122 respondents, all fourth-year university students, to choose between put and take. 77% of them chose put, which suggests that the expression put into consideration is indeed quite familiar to Kenyan English speakers. It was tested alongside another 19 idiomatic expressions. 17 out of the 20 were found to be familiar, though to varying degrees. But this familiarity was not reflected in corpus data from the International Corpus of English and the Corpus of Global Web-based English, where they were found to be rare. The same corpus data showed that this familiarity of the 20 expressions to Kenyan English speakers did not mean that they used them more frequently than their Standard International English counterparts. For example, the data showed that the “less familiar” take into consideration had more tokens in the Kenyan English components of the two corpora than the “more familiar” put into consideration. Nevertheless, the paper concludes that so-called Kenyan English idioms can still be claimed to be typical of Kenyan English, since they are practically absent from e. g. British English, its colonial ancestor.

This paper analyses lenition of lamino-alveolar and apico-alveolar fricative sibilants in Basque in casual conversations between speakers of the variety of Beasain (Central Basque dialect). To describe the phonetic realisation of sibilants, the following measures were used: the proportion of voiced frames, the centre of gravity and relative intensity. Results show that 13% of sibilants can be classified as ‘voiced’ (i.e. they show uninterrupted voicing during the middle 50% of the duration) and another 25% has at least one voiced frame in the middle interval. Several factors were identified as important predictors of voicing: context, speech rate and the presence of the word boundary. It is also shown that voicing lowers the sibilants’ centre of gravity and relative intensity. Finally, the paper discusses potential lexical effects in lenition phenomena.

Sri Lankan literature in English occupies an important place in postcolonial literature but can also position itself in the arc of ecocriticism. The aim of this paper is to explore Shehan Karunatilaka’s 2022 Booker Prize winning novel The Seven Moons of Maali Almeida by tracing a transition from despair to hope. Thematising the civil war in Sri Lanka, the novel depicts the Afterlife from the perspective of a recently dead photographer called Maali, who tries to solve the mystery of his death and retrieve some of his photographs. In the plot, despair and hope are of paramount importance and take on interesting traits. While the portrayal of despair strongly resembles its Elizabethan conception and can pave the way for intertextual interactions with Spenser’s The Faerie Queene, hope takes on ecocritical traits through a positive form of fragmentation, which bridges human/nonhuman boundaries, and a decolonial reading of the Sri Lankan landscape. By analysing specific excerpts from the novel, this paper will underline the ecocritical themes in the novel and highlight compelling connections with Spenser’s text. Thus, Sri Lankan ecocritical literature will be explored and interesting aspects of Karunatilaka’s novel, such as the transition from despair to hope, will be brought to the foreground.

Artificial Intelligence (AI) applied in the legal field has gained considerable ground in the recent years and is used in many fields, amongst which the legal one is of no exception. This paper wishes to explore the quality of the translation (from English into Italian) of an arbitration clause performed by the ChatGPT chatbot. To do so, the automatically generated target text is post-edited by consulting the BoLC (Bononia Legal Corpus) and the web as corpus in the gov.it Italian governmental domain. General and legal dictionaries are also used. The paper findings report some inaccuracies at word level which are easily tackled by corpus consultation. In view of the results obtained, however, complete reliance upon AI-driven solutions is not recommendable at the time being. Conversely, the use of ad hoc corpora and of targeted web searches are the most feasible and reliable solutions, although time-consuming.

The subject matter of this paper concerns the early phase of Vasily Grossman’s literary career in the mid1930s. Prior to this period, the author proved his ability to evaluate the mechanisms of censorship and developed his understanding of what was publishable and what could be sanctioned through the publication process of his first novel (Bit Yunan, Fel’dman 2019). The research material selected for this paper is the lesserknown short story Zhizn’ Il’i Stepanovicha [The life of Il’ya Stepanovich], published in 1935, and the aim is to provide a close reading and an interpretation key to this text. In order to expose the hidden ambiguity of the short story, the chosen research perspective includes a focus on the function of the protagonist as an entity that does not legitimise the socialist myth; a narratological approach on the use of proper names, on “perspective” and the role of the narrator with regard to the axiological structure of the text.

The subject matter of the paper is motivation for second language learning under specific conditions of military service in the Czech Armed Forces. Motivation is the fundamental source of any human action, influencing goals and objectives, attitudes and efforts but also results achieved by each individual. As such, motivation belongs to the most important factors of learners´ success. The paper is based on an explanatory research perspective, aiming at identifying the relative importance of different factors of motivation in second language learning. The presented paper methodology consists of a questionnaire survey, followed by an analysis and interpretation of gathered data. The research material, covered by the survey, is the motivation of the Czech Armed Forces personnel attending foreign language courses to learn second foreign language at the University of Defence Language Centre in 2022. This survey has been designed to enable language educators to identify and further analyse relative significance of individual motivational factors and their perception by second language learners as either internal, or external. As the survey outcomes show, the Czech military personnel motivation to learn second foreign language is not primarily generated by their current job needs and requirements. At the same time, the Czech military personnel attending foreign language courses perceive their learning motivation as predominantly internal.

This paper assumes high communicative relevance of fluency in intercultural university communication, where lecturing in the form of seminar presentations constitutes one of the most important key academic skills. An essential prerequisite for the transfer of knowledge from students to fellow students is not only appropriate subject knowledge, but also includes a range of rhetorical skills, which are indispensable even during the preparation of a presentation. Finally, it comes down to the ability to (largely) speak freely, which is often quite a challenge for inexperienced speakers. This is especially true for foreignlanguage students, as possible linguistic and/or phonetic inadequacies of non native speakers can be an additional hurdle in the smooth running of speech thought processes and thus in free fluent speech. Speaking with little or insufficient fluency can, under certain circumstances, trigger specific unintended communication effects, such as negative speaker attributions, impaired intelligibility and even loss of content. This problem is discussed in detail in this paper.

The concept of “constraint” is central to Oulipo’s work, yet the group has introduced this term into modern literary criticism without providing a consistent definition. The resulting ambiguities create challenges for researchers studying Oulipian constraints. This paper reviews Oulipo’s attempts to theorize constraint and legitimize its literature, examining these efforts through the lens of the group’s struggle for literary legitimacy. Indeed, the concept of constraint represents not only Oulipo’s poetic uniqueness, but also an important tool for the group to legitimize itself and gain power within the literary field. This paper argues that “constraint” has served as both an expression of Oulipo’s aesthetic singularity and a strategic lever in its bid for legitimacy.

The portrayal of women in the advertising industry has been a topic of ongoing debate for over four decades. Advertisers worldwide have been consistently accused of perpetuating inappropriate and degrading stereotypes of women, including their bodies and their perceived roles in a male-dominated society. Although recent years have seen increased public awareness of such harmful practices, with #metoo movement and some prominent brands promoting the concept of women’s empowerment, significant progress towards portraying women in a manner that respects their dignity and avoids reducing them to sexual objects still remains rather elusive. The primary objective of this paper is to analyse the representation of women in selected printed advertisements from the past two decades of advertising and determine whether there has been any significant shift in recent years. Additionally, the paper seeks to examine the possible implications of sexual objectification in contemporary advertising, with a particular focus on the potential transition from sexual objectification to sexual subjectification. The primary objective of this paper is to analyse the representation of women in selected printed advertisements from the past two decades of advertising and determine whether there has been any significant shift in recent years. Additionally, the paper seeks to examine the possible implications of sexual objectification in contemporary advertising, with a particular focus on the potential transition from sexual objectification to sexual subjectification.

Well-being in academia is obviously tied to levels of burnout experienced by academics. Why are these levels increasing and how is their increase related to the marketization and neoliberalisation of universities? What should we, as academics, do in order to counter this trend and improve both our well-being and that of our students as well as society? These questions are addressed through experimental writing, employing techniques that are unusual for linguistics, namely autoethnography, in order to reflect on academic careers and the problems of mental health and harassment experienced by PhD students. Drawing inspiration from “transformative praxis”, this paper describes the approach of social justice teaching and conscientization. Focusing in particular on the theme of environmental education, the paper reflects on how introducing social justice teaching in academic courses is likely to prove helpful to prevent burnout and dissatisfaction. The second part of the paper describes the author’s experience with university courses about ecolinguistics and the feedback received from students, including a selection of their comments.

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.

This article seeks to contribute to the growing literature on indirect translation by exploring the phenomenon in the context of twentieth and twenty-first-century Russian-English translation flows. In addition to reflecting transnational networks and the cultural (and linguistic) asymmetries embedded therein, indirect translation became a defining other of "modern" translation practice, specifically, what Gideon Toury describes as the norm of directness. The first part of the paper investigates the cultural politics of relay translation in reference to two case studies: the one involving the first English translation of Dmitrii Merezhkovskii's Voskresshie bogi [Resurrected Gods], published in the early twentieth century, with Russian as the source language, and the other concerns the first English translation of Georgian dissident Levan Berzenishvili's Gulag memoir Sacred Darkness, with Russian as the intermediary language, published in the early twenty-first century. Both case studies raise the question of the relationship between relay translation and textual integrity while underscoring the persistence of the phenomenon. The second part of the paper explores the rhetoric of indirect translation in Soviet culture, as represented in theoretical works, intelligentsia discourse and works of trans-fiction, that is, fictional works featuring translators and translation. While directness claims in the pre-World War II period were used to define Soviet translation practice as superior to pre-Soviet practice, those claims were deployed in the post-War period to critique the Soviet literary bureaucracy and to expose the hypocrisy behind the official policy of "Friendship of Peoples."

The paper explores the role of different forms of translation in the historical movement of ideas. Its main object of study is Abraham Rogerius’ description of Hinduism, first published in Dutch in 1651 and soon translated into German and French. Both translations add material provided independently by the translator. The German version and its addenda left echoes in a German oriental novel that was, in its turn, translated. An abridgement of the French version became part of a survey of the world’s religions that was also translated in its turn and helped shape the Enlightenment. The main aim of my paper is to document the various modes of translation, adaptation and appropriation that enabled this dissemination.

The present paper addresses the issue of pragmatic equivalence in literary translation, which is considered to be one of the most important aspects of linguistic uniformity between the source and target texts. Pragmatic equivalence of translation is defined as the conformity of the translator’s ‘duplication’ of the content with the author’s communicative intent or the literary objective. The cross-cultural pragmatic analysis of translation equivalence carried out in the paper focuses on the interpretations of the verbal behavior of the heroes while performing speech acts. For the purpose of analysis the novel by R. Bradbury “Dandelion Wine” and its Armenian and Russian translations are chosen. The research shows that the interpretative words nominating the heroes’ verbal behavior, namely, the verbs of speaking, are culture sensitive. Therefore, in some cases the translator may diverge from the source text in order to sound authentic in the target language. The comparative analysis of the samples served as a mediated translation approach, revealing certain linguistic and culture-specific points at issue in the translation process.

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 present paper discusses the status of translation in Occupied Palestine. The paper first provides a theoretical framework to set and expand the scene of the translation movement in Occupied Palestine. Methodologically, a questionnaire has been properly designed to carefully examine the status of translation, and then it is shared on social media platforms, namely Facebook, Instagram, and Twitter. The answers (30 in total) are received via Google Forms. The findings of the study reveal that no standards for translation is adopted. The study further shows that it is not an easy task to initiate working in Palestine. The study also points out how paramount it is to set legal rights and obligations of a Palestinian Translator/ Interpreter and to establish an association unifies the Palestinian translators.

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.

The subject of this paper is the relationship between the stability of synthetic case system and noun categories in sirinić speech, which is a part of prizren-timoc dialect zone in Serbian language. The existing foundings about synthetic declensions and categories of gender and number have been tested by using corpus and quantitative method in this paper. This research has confirmed that synthetic cases are better preserved in singular than in plural and that they are the most stable in feminine nouns, less in muscular and the least stable in neuter nouns. In plural, dative remains only in musculine and femine nouns. A greater number of cases has been found in singular, but their percentage compared to general case indicates that they persisted only in limited functions and meanings.

The paper aims to discuss Polish terms that name authority bodies under the administrative law and their English equivalents. The Polish terms under analysis appear in the first Division of the Polish Code of Administrative Procedure of 14 June 1960 and the English equivalents of each Polish term researched have been suggested in the Polish Code of Administrative Procedure translation into English. The research problem is to determine the translation methods applied and to verify whether translation methods used in the Polish-English translation of the above terms which have been determined as culture-specific items appear among translation methods applied when translating culture-specific elements suggested by Hejwowski (2007). Furthermore, to verify whether the mentioned translation methods appear among the translation methods discussed by Weston (1993) which are recommended to be applied while translating legal terms. The theoretical part of the paper includes a presentation of the definitions of a legal term, culture-specific item and the classification of translation methods by Hejwowski and Weston. The research stages include the comparison of definitions of source elements and definitions of their equivalents, as long as they appear in monolingual English law dictionaries.

This paper studied the postmodern posture through the hybridism between History and Literature by electing the counterfactual novel as its object. The paper’s aim is to analyze the production of counterfactual literature studies in Brazil under qualitative and quantitative perspective. The hypotheses contemplated is that Brazilian counterfactual literature studies are yet incipient and due to this fact must be promoted. The chosen methodology was Bibliometrics. Researchers used the terms: “história contrafactual”, “história alternativa”, “romance histórico” and “metaficcção científica”. Since 2013, the results display an increase in number of publications. The authors have a network of publications/citations for terms “história contrafactual” and “romance histórico”. The VOSViewer software was used to develop a quantitative analysis and an author network.

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 demonstrates the sociocultural impact of translation by examining reports about Siberia from foreign travelers and writers in the seventeenth century. The main research method is from Jerzy Bartmiński, who founded the Ethnolinguistics School of Lublin, and his cognitive approach (Bartmiński 2009). The current study is a continuation of our extensive research related to the stereotypes that represent colloquial images of Siberia and the Cognitive Definition of Siberia among Spanish speakers on the Iberian Peninsula. This is based on linguistic units found in Spanish corpora spanning from 1736 to 2014. The aim of this paper is to trace how the translation of works by scientists who wrote about Siberia in the seventeenth century contributed to the penetration of stereotypical ideas about this region into different cultures, particularly within Spanish culture.

This paper seeks to establish the cognitive contextual frames of references (CFRs) in the translation of George Orwell’s Animal Farm from English to Kiswahili. The source text “Animal Farm” and the target text "Shamba la Wanyama" were used to gather the study's data. The paper offers insights on how CFRs can be employed in literary translation to domesticate the target text so that it is relevant to the target language audience. Specific word and phrase meanings were deduced from sentences of both the source text and the target text. The analyzed data revealed that the translator used organizational category shifts, textual category shifts, communicational category shifts, and socio-cultural category shifts. The most common CFRs in the Kiswahili translation of Animal Farm were found to be communicational category shifts. The target text is made relevant to the audience through such manipulations.

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.

THE NAME MOWA CHACHŁACKA (KHAKHOL LANGUAGE) IN ACCOUNTS FROM DISPLACED POST-WAR MIGRANTS FROM THE EAST TO WESTERN POLAND This paper concerns the usage of the linguonym mowa chachłacka (Khakhol language) in Galicia, Podolia and Volhynia during the first half of the 20th Century. Therefore, it can be considered in the realm of historical sociolinguistics. The source material is comprised of interviews, recorded 1992–2006, with over 100 forced migrants from eastern voivodeships of the interwar Second Polish Republic. After World War 2, the respondents were resettled from their home towns into the new borders of post-war Poland, areas which belonged to Germany until 1945. The research method chosen was partially standardized interviews, which were first recorded and then written down. The paper is focused around the following issues: 1) which linguistic variety was referred to as mowa chachłacka in the interwar period within the researched communities, 2) whether this name contained a value judgement, 3) what was the prestige of mowa chachłacka in these communities. The first chapter of the paper concerns the history of the Russian lexeme хохол/хaхол, which forms the basis of the linguonym mowa chachłacka, and which has been used since the 17th Century to refer to Ukrainians. The article takes into account ideas concerning researching social attitudes to a language, such as standard language ideology and monoglossic ideology.