Contrastive Pragmatics and Translation

Evaluation, epistemic modality and communicative styles in English and German

Author
Svenja Kranich | Johannes Gutenberg-Universität Mainz
HardboundAvailable
ISBN 9789027256669 | EUR 90.00 | USD 135.00
 
e-Book
ISBN 9789027267276 | EUR 90.00 | USD 135.00
 
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This book provides the first comprehensive account of English-German pragmatic contrasts in written discourse and their effects on English-German translations. The novel and multi-dimensional corpus-based studies of business communication and popular science writing presented in this book combine quantitative and qualitative approaches and focus on the use of evaluative adjectives and epistemic modal markers. They provide empirical evidence that English and German differ in systematic ways and that translations, while being adapted to target audience’s preferences to a large extent, are clearly susceptible to source language interference when it comes to more fine-grained differences. The book discusses which general factors determine the degree of impact of source language features on translations and also comments on the possibility of source language influence on target language norms via translations. The book is of interest to researchers and students in a variety of fields, such as pragmatics, translation studies, genre analysis and stylistics.
[Pragmatics & Beyond New Series, 261] 2016.  xiv, 204 pp.
Publishing status: Available
Table of Contents
“This work contributes to the empirical research in contrastive linguistics by investigating the pragmatic dimensions of language contact between English and German on the one hand, and by shedding light on the influence of translations within this language pair and thus on language change through translated text on the other. Both aspects are highly innovative.”
“I highly recommend this empirical corpus-based study of the relationship between German-English pragmatic contrasts, translation and language change.”
“This book offers an in-depth analysis of pragmatic contrasts found in English and German business communication and popular scientific writings and their rendition in translations. It throws light on the different rhetorical strategies used in English and German letters to shareholders and popular scientific articles and proves that formal and functional systemic differences are more prone to adaptation in translations and original texts than pragmatic contrasts. The study provides invaluable guidelines for translators and their trainers, who should be aware not only of structural contrasts between languages but also pragmatic and stylistic ones.”
“The book is very readable and well structured. It provides useful insights into communicative practices in two linguacultures and professional communities and convincingly indicates where translators should concentrate when working between English and German.”
“Kranich’s volume is a very valuable, well-documented and well-written work on contrastive pragmatics and translation, offering innovative approaches and convincing analyses and interpretations. The study helps paving the way for more research in this area, adopting a similar approach while focusing on a larger variety of linguistic features, linguacultures and genres. The book will prove particularly inspiring for scholars in pragmatics and translation studies, and it may also be interesting for English-German translators as well as university students with German and English in their curriculum.”
Cited by

Cited by 14 other publications

Fastrich, Bridgit
2024. (Im)personalization in German and English Negative Online Reviews: Contrasts, Comparisons, and Cognitive Implications. International Journal of Business Communication 61:1  pp. 39 ff. DOI logo
Fronhofer, Nina-Maria
2019. Chapter 9. My anger was justified surely?. In Emotion in Discourse [Pragmatics & Beyond New Series, 302],  pp. 213 ff. DOI logo
House, Juliane & Dániel Z. Kádár
2021. Cross-Cultural Pragmatics, DOI logo
Kranich, Svenja
Lee, KyeongHwa
2023. Analyse der kognitiven Aspekte beim Translationsprozess mittels Eye-Tracker. In Zukunftsformate der Fachkommunikationsforschung [Forum für Fachsprachen-Forschung, 164],  pp. 281 ff. DOI logo
Locher, Miriam A., Daria Dayter & Thomas C. Messerli
2023. Chapter 1. Interpreting, translating, transferring. In Pragmatics and Translation [Pragmatics & Beyond New Series, 337],  pp. 1 ff. DOI logo
Manzella, Pietro
2020. “Dear Emma…”. Genre Overlapping and Register Variation in the English and Italian Version of Sergio Marchionne’s Letter to Confindustria. Comparative Legilinguistics 44:1  pp. 45 ff. DOI logo
Napoli, Vittorio
2023. Chapter 8. “There is no doubt, you must be right!”. In Pragmatics and Translation [Pragmatics & Beyond New Series, 337],  pp. 173 ff. DOI logo
Nisticò, Simona
2023. Chapter 5. Translating conflict in written fiction. In Pragmatics and Translation [Pragmatics & Beyond New Series, 337],  pp. 96 ff. DOI logo
Van Herck, Rebecca, Babette Dobbenie & Sofie Decock
2021. Person- versus content-oriented approaches in English and German email responses to customer complaints: a cross-cultural analysis of moves and first-person pronouns. Intercultural Pragmatics 18:2  pp. 203 ff. DOI logo
Verschueren, Jef
2016. Contrastive pragmatics. In Handbook of Pragmatics, DOI logo
Verschueren, Jef
2022. Contrastive pragmatics. In Handbook of Pragmatics [Handbook of Pragmatics, ],  pp. 349 ff. DOI logo
Yue, Yan & Canzhong Wu
2022. Epistemic stance in the translations of Chinese medicine classics: a case study of Huang Di Nei Jing . Text & Talk 42:2  pp. 279 ff. DOI logo

This list is based on CrossRef data as of 18 february 2024. Please note that it may not be complete. Sources presented here have been supplied by the respective publishers. Any errors therein should be reported to them.

Subjects

Translation & Interpreting Studies

Translation Studies

Main BIC Subject

CFG: Semantics, Pragmatics, Discourse Analysis

Main BISAC Subject

LAN009000: LANGUAGE ARTS & DISCIPLINES / Linguistics / General
ONIX Metadata
ONIX 2.1
ONIX 3.0
U.S. Library of Congress Control Number:  2016001810 | Marc record