Volume 11 (2019): Issue 3 (December 2019)

Technological advances have had an impact not only on the translation but also on the interpretation market. Furthermore, with the advent and widespread use of new information and communication technologies (ICTs) in the field of language mediation, the professions traditionally called “translation” and “interpreting” have been transformed by the digital revolution. In times of upheaval, profound changes can be felt in the market, the working environment, the conditions and processes as well as in the way language mediators work, the tasks they carry out, and the roles they play in the translation process. In the present article, we shall focus on these major changes and highlight the latest developments first in the field of translation and then in interpreting.

This paper discusses a corpus of so-called carmina gratulatoria, or gratulatory poems, composed by 17^th-century Hungarian peregrines in Hebrew. The paper argues that this understudied type of text offers a valuable resource for a wide range of fields due to the sociohistorical, cultural, and linguistic information the texts contain.

International relations often cause culture shock not only for the foreigners visiting a country but also for the residents of that country. While nowadays this shock can be diminished by making people who move to another country become more aware of and understand the differences between cultures through all sorts of sources of information, this was not so easy at the end of the 19^th century.

In this paper, my intention is to bring to light the culture shock experienced by one of the first French persons to set foot in the Joseon Kingdom (current Korea) and by the first Korean woman who travelled to France at the turn of the 19^th century. I will investigate some non-verbal elements of culture, such as artefacts, food, and habits, which often make foreigners feel frustrated and confused, becoming incapable of interacting in a meaningful way in the new culture. The framework I will use is the “culture shock model” put forward by Oberg (1954), according to which this phenomenon unfolds in 4 stages: the “honeymoon”, the crisis, the adjustment, and the adaptation. The data is provided by Kyung-Sook Shin’s (2007) novel, Yi Jin, based on a true story (translated into Romanian as Dansul privighetorii de primăvară, 2017, Humanitas), from which I have excerpted the most relevant fragments regarding the topic.

The paper concludes with the idea that, at least in the time which creates the temporal backdrop of the investigated novel, the absence of intercultural encounters, the lack of solid information about each other’s cultures as well as the different patterns of experience of the main characters lead to their estrangement.

HBO Hungary’s original series, Aranyélet, proves to be an interesting case study in terms of location strategies in Eastern European TV shows. It is refreshing in the sense that – contrary to other TV programmes attempting to showcase life in Budapest – it does not feel the need to represent locality by swamping the viewer with iconic tourist destinations of the capital. Instead, the characteristic “Hungarianness” of the show appears through displaying personal living spaces of people from a wide range of socio-cultural backgrounds, all of which represent the typical Hungarian strata.

In our paper, we have used a simplified categorization of social classes apparent in Hungarian society and connected these groups with characters of Aranyélet. Then, we have scrutinized the living spaces of these characters as represented in the show, paying special attention to their likely location, furnishing, building materials, and general condition. By this analysis, we aim to prove that the show tries to create an alternative mental map of Budapest and its population, covering all strata of society with painting a picture of their lifestyle and living conditions.

Our paper draws on the work of Kim Toft Hansen and Anne Marit Waade, who, in their volume Locating Nordic Noir – From Beck to The Bridge, place a large emphasis on aspects of location studies in contemporary Scandinavian crime.

The present paper is devoted to the translation theoretical, linguistic-textual comparison of the Hungarian film dialogues and their English subtitles of the short dramedy entitled Susotázs [Chuchotage, 2018] and directed by Barnabás Tóth, winner of several film festivals and shortlisted for Academy Awards in 2019. Subtitling is considered to be a form of rewriting, requiring text reduction through condensation, reformulation, and omission at word and/or sentence level (Díaz Cintas–Remael 2007). Following the theoretical considerations regarding the linguistic aspects of subtitling and its strategies, the paper discusses several aspects of rendering the Hungarian dialogue in the form of English subtitles, such as forms of address, informal expressions, and culture-specific elements. Finally, the analysis aims to highlight the possibilities of making Hungarian humour available in English.

The assertion we start from in our study is that in specialized languages metaphor is a figure of reason rather than a figure of speech. The general objective of the study is researching the interdisciplinary status of specialized metaphor – terminological and conceptual – by making reference to the hard core of terminology. Derived objectives: comparative research of the degree of scientificity of interdisciplinary metaphor, at the hard core of lexis, following metaphorical transfer; descriptive-linguistic and cognitive research of the general and particular conceptual features that are preserved within this type of internal terminology. The approach is descriptive-contrastive.

One of the conclusions of the research is that the central sphere of specialized lexis, by expansion, supplies terms that may be specialized or may go through a new metaphorical transfer without altering the degree of scientificity in the target fields.

Plain language movement has a long history and has achieved significant changes in the USA and in many European countries. However, the situation is not as good as that in Hungary, especially in the field of law. As a researcher in two empirical “law and language” projects in Hungary since 2000, the author presents her experiences gained during preparing and analysing tape recordings of police interrogations and court hearings as regards comprehension of legal language. The paper focuses especially on the understandability of providing information on the rights and obligations of laymen in legal procedures given by legal professionals. It also summarizes the recent changes in Hungarian legal regulations providing a better understanding of rights and obligations (partly based on the 2012/13/ EU Directive on the right to information in criminal proceedings). As regards the practice of adjudication, the paper compares the way of providing information to laymen before and after the modification of legal norms. Two positive examples can be mentioned: (1) a few years ago, a group of legal and linguistic experts prepared a so-called Stylebook with recommendations to improve the structure and wordings of court verdicts, and (2) within the framework of a project called The Year of Comprehensibility at Courts, 2017 the improvement of comprehensible communication was integrated into an obligatory training for judges.

Emphasis is largely associated with the expression of emotional involvement in speech acts in general. In the fictional dialogue, the relevance of emphasis is multiplied due to several considerations. Firstly, the emphatic utterances impact the emotional content of the text and affect its style and reception. Secondly, it is the compromises and the careful linguistic and stylistic choices that authors have to make in order to effectively render the emphasis typical of speech in the written mode. Thirdly, if a work of literature is translated, the emphasis that the dialogue displays is to be equally forceful in its target language version. With these considerations in view, the study sets out to examine the possibility of obtaining a similarly emphatic content of an English source text in translational Romanian by means of lexical items. To this end, a relevant number of emphatic dialogic instances have been depicted for analysis from John Fowles’s novel Mantissa and from its translation into Romanian. The objectives of this study are to identify the level of equivalence in the two versions of the novel and to shed a comparative light on the lexical means that lead to the realization of emphasis in English and Romanian.

In this study, we attempt to approach the problem of foreign language teaching from the viewpoint of language pedagogy development in different historical periods: from the grammar translation method through the audio-lingual approaches and up to communicative and post-communicative methods. We have come today to reconsider the role and status of language teaching not only because globalization has produced an increase in the number of speakers of English all around the world but also due to the fact that the issue of localization (of language teaching methods and techniques) has also come to the fore. This meta-analytical article circumscribes a number of popular methods amongst which teachers can choose, and we also try to summarize the most important foreign language teaching methods that can be spotted in the era of what is presently called the post-method condition.

Linguistic and cultural mediators, such as translators, interpreters, and language teachers, need complex and well-developed language skills in all the languages they work with. In this study, we examine the connections and correlations among the following skills: reading literacy in native language, reading literacy in foreign language, problem solving and translation. Three of these skills (reading in native and foreign language and problem solving) are evaluated on a three-level scale based on the three cognitive processes used in Programme for International Student Assessment (PISA) assessments (location of information, understanding, evaluation and reflection) (Organisation for Economic Co-operation and Development – OECD 2018). The methodology of measuring reading comprehension in native language and problem-solving skills has already been developed and applied by our research group (Pletl 2019, Harangus 2018); therefore, after assessing the foreign language reading literacy and translation skills, we will be able to analyse the translator trainees’ results based on the aforementioned three-level scale and examine possible connections and correlations between the different but interrelated skills. With an interdisciplinary approach, this study concentrates on revealing the overlaps and meeting points, the spaces in between the use of these skills.

The in-betweenness of my research is the indeterminate space between being a man and talking like one and being a woman and talking like one. The control of that space is power-driven, and it consists of a permanent struggle to impose one’s discourse as a strong marker of one’s gender. Subliminally, gender takes control of one’s discourse, impregnating it with the linguistic readily inherited data of manhood and womanhood. My research is an investigation of the discursive strategies that both men and women retort to when asked to state their opinion on different matters. Speech acts, vocabulary choices, liaising or showing empathy or, on the contrary, showing disinterest or taking distance will be interpreted in the framework of gender studies. The study has demonstrated that largely-held opinions of what is gender-specific talking are partially contradicted by the participants in the study, which proves my hypothesis right. Different factors, such as education or family background, influence personal speaking policies to the point of sharing features of the opposite gender. Far from being an issue that needs a clear separation, in-betweenness aims at mapping gender-specific and, if any, overlapping strategies in discourse.

This paper aims to better understand the process of educational transfer from Western countries to developing ones by proposing an analytical framework. The framework, besides counting for the major challenges of a specific educational transfer, also proposes to analyse some of the factors of different cultural-educational contexts that may help or burden institutional innovation. The framework had been tested by case study research focusing on the educational transfer of liberal arts colleges from the Netherlands to China. In the cities of Chongqing and Taigu, two undergraduate colleges grounded the case of investigation in order to study the experiential perceptions of stakeholders shortly after the implementation of liberal arts programmes (2012). Meanwhile, the data revealed different interest groups and particular institutional constrains, and the analytical framework greatly helped to understand and illustrate issues of compatibility, acceptance, mobilization of different stakeholders, and strategies for both individual and institutional agency. As the research contributed to a dissertation essay completed in 2016 at Beijing Normal University, the present study’s objective is to highlight the importance of analytical framework(s) in the process of interpreting data into research findings.

The present study deals with language planning and language policy in the Scandinavian countries and aims to sketch their peculiarities. The investigation is both diachronic und synchronic, using the historical-comparative method and making use of the research results of linguistic disciplines as language history, sociolinguistics, etc. Language planning and language policy in the Scandinavian countries are very powerful. In spite of the strong resemblances between the Scandinavian languages and the strong pan-Scandinavian tendencies, the language planning and the linguistic policy of each individual Scandinavian country show differing tendencies. Most consequently, language planning is carried out in Iceland. In Icelandic, purism has gone the furthest. Danish is the most conservative language, but it is also most tolerant towards the foreign words.