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This article discusses one of many possible strategies that translators use in rendering an idiom from a L1 to a L2, i.e. the verbatim or the literal translation. The points of view according to this strategy differ very much among the researchers: some treat them as semantic false friends. Based on the replies to a questionnaire that was handed out to 10 Romanian native speakers, one could state that the context in which the literal translation of a source-idiom is situated plays an important role for the understanding of the text. Beyond that, the translation of an idiom cannot be judged only by virtue of the denotative meaning – the pragmatic function of the translation as a whole is just as important. The questionnaire was compiled of literal translations of Swedish idioms into Romanian (from different translations of different novels). The article further discusses some of the text examples from this questionnaire and describes some of the phenomena related to idioms which hinder the so-called idiom-understanding and which probably led to misinterpretation and a failed literal translation.
Wie öffentlich ist die Hand? : Über Sinn und Unsinn eines Signifikanztests in der Korpuslinguistik
(2012)
In this article it will be shown that the use of a special statistical method for testing the significance of the co-occurrence of the type öffentlich+Hand (the Chi square test) does not make sense in a very large corpus. That means that one main test for measuring the significance of a collocation cannot be applied under standard conditions.
The paper presents an analysis and a comparison of the meanings and functions of proverbs in two editorials by the lawyer and journalist Dr Jakob Eben. The texts comment on the situation and the relations between nationalities in the Habsburg Monarchy in July 1880. One proverb is used in its normal form by the author (directly), while the other appears in a modified form, in a quotation (indirectly). In both cases the proverbs are used as part of a persuasive strategy in the text type of the editorial, for the purpose of provoking antipathy against the "others", i.e. the Czech politicians as political rivals, by means of their negative characteristics. In their specific co-text and context, the proverbs acquire additional semantic-pragmatic components of meaning, enabling them to participate in various isotopic chains and to contribute significantly to textual coherence. Additionally, their positioning marks important points in the argumentative structure of the text. The analysis also indicates some possibilities for the specification of semantic and pragmatic information in dictionaries.
This article examines the expression and description of fear in German and Czech phraseology. Fear – one of the primary emotions – is viewed in a broad sense. The analysis of this semantic field also includes such variations as anxiety, panic, fright, horror, and terror. As it is impossible to cover the full phraseological range for this semantic field in both languages, the boundaries of the corpus were set with reference to the repertoire of expressions included in selected phraseological dictionaries. The use of these idiomatic expressions in practice was verified with reference to large-scale corpora in the individual languages. The article offers an analysis of the corpus from a cognitive perspective. For each of the languages, the first step was to identify the concepts which are mediated via selected phraseological expressions. The concepts were then compared, revealing similarities and differences between German and Czech in this respect.