Open Access

The Western European culture in the 18th century builds an impressive reference framework for the intellectual life in Central and Eastern Europe, where the ideals of the Enlightenment had spread rapidly mainly by means of translations of secularized works from all fields of knowledge. Among these, one should mention a series of historical writings that give account of the great monarchs of the time. In the following study we try to illustrate the concept of “cultural translation” by analysing a historical text about Catherine II of Russia. The Moldavian manuscript illustrates the process in which ideas and concepts have circulated in the European space: it is an Austrian (Habsburg) portrait of a German princess that managed to be crowned empress of Russia under debatable circumstances. This portrait written at the court of Joseph II in 1877 was translated in the same year in Greek and through this intermediary entered the Romanian speaking soil, where it was translated a year after. The circulation of ideas and conceptions respectively misconceptions can be illustrated in then textual mutations that occurred during this cultural transfer process from East to West and then to East again. The ideological and political intent of the text can be also seen in the self-aware translation that aimed to bring plusvalue to the Enlightened discourse of its original text.

Each language has its own silence, which is a mirror; one gets to see in it that the unsaid is not uttered. The fact that people from different cultures understand one another is not self-evident. Practice shows that understanding does not run smoothly. The way cultures can understand other cultures is to be pointed out with the help of conversation as the prototype of language use, as the source of all uses of language. The present article deals with silence in communication. He who is silent imparts something as well and the others react to it. They react differently, depending on the situation, on individually and culturally determined contexts. Words and silence are all of communicative nature. They influence people, who react to them. Every instance of communication contains a piece of information and reference to the communication partners. Each linguistic exchange involves a cultural exchange, and consists of the contribution of speaker and listener to the linguistic utterances, of the turn-taking of speakers. Silence can more precisely be defined in a conversation as ‘meaningful silence’ or as ‘the act of falling silent’, as ‘quietness’.

The modern lexicography must meet certain requirements in order to ensure an adequate lexicographical coverage of the presented lexical inventory. The relevant published literature dedicated to the profile of lemmas within the current lexicographical practice reveals shortcomings that reflect the gap between the current linguistic reality and the usual lexicographical practice. From the user’s perspective and his consulting needs modern metalexicography stresses the need for a fair lexicographical exposure, empirically grounded, capable of indicating peculiarities and restrictions of the usage within the language. Parting from theoretical considerations, regarding the relevance of the criteria that define the quality of a lexicographical work, the principle of addressability and the current phraseographic practice, the article presents directions and ways of researching for the phraseological inventory in terms of relevant peculiarities for the mono- or bilingual lexicographical practice. Exemplary there are discussed modern empirical methods meant to improve the current lexicographical practice insisting upon the evidence provided by the corpus as object and means of verifying the hypothesis of theoretical or applied research. The analysis of occurrences extracted from corpora is a valuable tool for the lexicographer because it allows the identification of the specific characteristics belonging to fixed structures within usual multiple contexts, patterns of use, concordances and co-selections. An authoritative body of linguistic evidence allows observations of mutations occurring in use or frequency of distributions, as well as identifying outlying areas of phraseology which so far have been insufficiently investigated or ignored by the lexicographical practice.

Art is always an expression of the unconscious. By archetypal images, the artist addresses in addition to the conscious side also the unconscious side of the reader. For literature, this means the existence of two levels of text- a superficial one on which the conscious and deliberate act takes place, and a deeper, symbolic, expression of unconscious contents. According to Jungian theories of the archetype in literature, the choice of the archetype allows us to draw conclusions on the historical and social environment of the writer, because such images often have a compensatory nature.

While the title of Friedrich Schlegel’s novel Lucinde (1799) bears the name of a woman, the eponymic protagonist in Dorothea Schlegel’s novel Florentin (1801) is a man. Both novels have remained fragmentary as well in the literal as in the romantic sense of the word, both novels deal with literary constructions of femininity and masculinity. While Dorothea follows a more traditional role model in her primarily narrative novelistic text, Friedrich pursues in his predominantly speculative novelistic text rather new ways of thinking. According to the romantic concept of ‚progressive Universalpoesie’ he combines the two distinct principles of femininity and masculinity by establishing a connection between them and at the same time dissolving them in a universal context.