Germanistische Beiträge 30.2012
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This paper gives a critical view to the collective volume Etudes à la loupe… Optikinstrumente und Literatur, edited at the Stefan cel Mare University publishing house Suceava. The contributors propose an ample incursion into optics as a literary motif, opening a multitude of points of view, which serve as guiding cues for interdisciplinary research.
The following paper deals with the volume of studies Stadt-Land-Fluss. Eine kulturwissenschaftliche Deutschlandreise (Ed. Flegel, Silke, Hoffmann, Frank). The book offers a journey through the history and present time of Germany focusing on such national heritage areas as: literature, language, industrial and structural change, environmental protection, federalism, as well as remembering “the past”. The 216-page volume includes twelve essays on German cultural areas and sites of memory: Leipzig, Halle, Munich, Berlin and Frankfurt - as well as regions like the Ruhr and Sachsen-Anhalt. Major streams, such as the Rhine or the Elbe, are also taken into consideration.
The aim of the present paper is to describe the geographic diffusion of the family name Pfaff in Germany, starting from the telephone directory of 2005 and retracing the historic linguistic phenomena that led to the formation of this name. Pfaff (mhd. phaffe, md. paffe, nd. pape, southern German Pfaffe “priest” or “churchman”) is explained both as an agnomen and as the name of a profession. Our map represents an addition to the maps that have already appeared in dtv – Atlas Namenkunde (1999), Duden-Familiennamen (2005) and Deutscher Familiennamenatlas (2011), for it additionally and thoroughly renders not? only the geographic diffusion of the family name Pfaff in Germany but also in Transylvania, where the name also exists. [this surname also exists in Transylvania]. The type Pfaff (5056 telephone addresses) is spread all over Germany, but we notice two areas of high frequency: one, according to our expectations, in the southern part of the Benrath Line and on the right of the Germersheim Line, but also on the left of the latter, especially in the rectangle Koblenz – Kassel – Hof – Frankfurt and also in south-western Germany (in Schwarzwald –The Black Forest). The northern version Pape, approximately twice more frequent than Pfaff(e), did not adapt to standard German, due to the negative connotations of the appellative Pfaffe, Pfaffen, which appeared at the same time as the Church Reform in the 16th century. In some places in Transylvania, the surname Pfaff was replaced with the version Prediger. The appellative Pfaffe and the family name Pfaff (in the Saxon language – the Romanian “limba sãseascã”: faf, pfaf ) contributed to the formation of different rural toponyms in Transylvania. The surname Pfaff is spread not only in the German linguistic space, but also in areas where ethnic Germans live (France, Luxembourg, Belgium, Holland, Poland, Romania, USA, Canada, Argentina). In Romania, there are very few Pfaff surnames in telephone books for the 2008-2009 period, due to the massive migration of the German ethnics to Germany after 1990.
This study indicates research areas from the perspective of the German and Romanian language phraseology, areas that are exemplified within the phraseosemantic field of „communication”. The analysis of the current state of research indicates the partial or complete lack of preoccupation, on the one hand, with the metaphorization process and the predominance of the conceptual metaphors in the two languages or the dominance of some components and their analysis from a cultural-specific point of view, and, on the other hand, with the systematization of morphosyntactic or semantic restrictions.
The current article deals with the feedback issue in the study of foreign languages, both from the perspective of traditional learning, as well as from the perspective of computer assisted learning. The possibilities and limits, advantages and disadvantages of each case are presented and compared, and the new demands and opportunities on the educational - and job market are being mentioned.
The Romanian poet and essayist Ion Pillat (1891-1945) ranks among the relatively often translated writers of his generation (authors who were active during the interwar period). His works have kept the attention of the German readership several times: Two volumes by Ion Pillat, which appeared in 1943 and 1976 (containing translations by Konrad Richter and Bernhard Capesius, respectively by Wolf von Aichelburg), as well as varied publications in anthologies and other publications have contributed to the spread of his work in Germany and Austria. The author offers an overview of the existing translations and, in the end, refers to his own attempts at translating Ion Pillat’s poetry into German.
This succint introduction to Radu Vancu, the young poet and university lecturer invited to the reading organized by the Department of German Studies as part of its annual scientific conference, offers some biographical and exegetical points of reference for the author’s literary and professional evolution. For instance, there is the apprenticeship (rather a “friendshipin-love”) with the venerated master: the poet, gifted translator and man of culture Mircea Ivãnescu, whom he praises in his doctoral thesis as ”the poet of absolute discretion”. Then there is his editing activity at the “Transilvania” Cultural Journal, a publication of original critical and essayistic writings. His forceful, resourceful and sensitive lyrical work shows two dominant themes: on the one hand, the traumatising early loss of his father, and on the other hand, the birth and growing-up of his son Sebastian, for whom the poet builds, with endless affection and humour, a magical livresque universe, populated by fabulous creatures.
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.
"Spieglein, Spieglein an der Wand ..." : das Diminutiv im Überzetzungsvergleich Deutsch-Rumänisch
(2012)
The paper presents some aspects connected to the system of diminution in German and Romanian, by offering a comparative analysis of the German version of the fairy tale “Snow White” and six Romanian translations of the text. The focus lies on the ways in which the nouns in the text are marked as ‘diminutives’ in German (mainly by adding suffixes, the synthetic diminutives) and the equivalences suggested by the Romanian translators. Although the category ‘diminution’ is common to both languages, there are significant differences in the way it is linguistically expressed. A main part of the paper is devoted to these differences and their reflection in the text.