In the context of diagnostic uncertainty moments of irritation can arise, which linguistically disguise uncertainty of the physicians or result in uncertainty on the patient’s side. We investigated the occurrence of uncertainty in history-taking encounters by reconstructing the dealing with… read more
The transfer of linguistic findings into institutional practice sometimes appears to be a one-way street in which language experts provide solutions for communication problems but, in return, don’t receive insight from the institutions they work with. To emphasize the potential value of applied… read more
This article builds on previous research on ad-hoc interpreting in German hospitals. It discusses the concept of interpreters as “intervenient beings” and its consequences for interpreter training. Although the concept seems to be descriptively adequate, it disregards difficulties of interpreters… read more
This paper explores the question how language corpora can enhance discourse analytic research as well as communication trainings. To do this, we refer to the language corpus “Interpreting in hospitals”, and begin by describing it in detail. Subsequently, the paper exemplifies how the corpus was… read more
In case of a crisis companies are recommended to follow a one-voice-policy in the communication with their stakeholders. The following chapter investigates how the one-voice-policy is performed in multilingual business writing. In doing so it will be shown which linguistic means are sensitive for… read more
This article examines the challenges of societal multilingualism and language barriers for communication in the context of medical services in Germany. Although there is evidence that ad-hoc-interpreting may cause communication problems, bilingual employees are often engaged in communication… read more
In this paper we deal with “linking constructions”, a phenomenon in the field of “connectivity”1 that has to our knowledge rarely been examined in monolingual texts and discourses, let alone contrastively. We will first relate these devices to the general area of connectivity, then we will look… read more