Lessico medico e traduzione. Considerazioni contrastive per il tedesco e l’italiano

In the German medical language, but not so much in the Italian one, there are basically two different types of terms: neoclassical terms, compounds made up of Latin or Ancient Greek elements, also named internationalisms, and native terms, mainly morphological calques that preserve the structure of the neoclassical compound but use German elements and are therefore semantically transparent to the general public. This difference between the German and Italian medical language creates some difficulties to the translator, both from German to Italian and from Italian to German, primarily at the lower level of specialized discourse, i.e. in expert-lay communication. This paper will suggest some translation strategies and will illustrate the case of a text genre specific to medical language, the package leaflet

Investmentempfehlungen in deutschen Börsenmagazinen. : Eine pragmatisch leser(un)freundliche Textsorte

The topic of this study is the pragmatics of investment recommendations in German financial magazines. The target reader, mainly a private investor, expects a clear assessment of the quality of the investment product and a corresponding operative instruction regarding his investment decision (whether he should buy, sell or hold a certain stock, mutual fund, or bond). On the basis of a large corpus of over five thousand texts from the most important weekly magazines (Börse Online, Der Aktionär, Focus Money) it is investigated to what extent this text genre meets reader expectations. Investment recommendations show a potentially complex pragmatic structure including, among others, a headline, an evaluation of relevant arguments (pros and cons) and the operative instruction (buy/sell/hold). However, crucial elements may be missing or even give conflicting hints concerning the investment decision. Moreover, operative instructions often tend to be formulated as rather vague indirect speech acts, limiting the overall pragmatic user-friendliness. These apparent inconsistencies can be put down to a secondary pragmatic goal from the perspective of the writer: not only to give good advice, but also not to be held accountable for bad advice

IL LESSICO DELLA MEDICINA. UN CONFRONTO ITALIANO-TEDESCO IN PROSPETTIVA DIDATTICO-TRADUTTIVA

Questo studio contrastivo analizza il lessico medico in italiano e in tedesco da un punto di vista teorico-sistematico e didattico. Esistono due tipi di tecnicismi: i tecnicismi specifici, per lo più formazioni neoclassiche con elementi greco-latini (chiamate anche internazionalismi) e i cosiddetti tecnicismi collaterali che hanno la mera funzione stilistica di innalzare il registro. Il presente articolo tratta il lessico medico nella prospettiva dell’insegnamento della traduzione specializzata a parlanti madrelingua tedeschi.   The lexicon of medicine. An Italian-German comparison from a didactic-translating perspective In this contrastive study, medical vocabulary in Italian and German is analyzed from a systemic and didactic point of view. There are mainly two types of technical terms: proper terms, mostly neoclassical formations made up of Latin or Ancient Greek elements (also called internationalisms), and “collateral” terms which have only a stylistic function. This article deals with medical vocabulary from the perspective of teaching specialized translation to German native speakers

Investmentempfehlungen in deutschen Börsenmagazinen. Eine pragmatisch leser(un)freundliche Textsorte

The topic of this study is the pragmatics of investment recommendations in German financial magazines. The target reader, mainly a private investor, expects a clear assessment of the quality of the investment product and a corresponding operative instruction regarding his investment decision (whether he should buy, sell or hold a certain stock, mutual fund, or bond). On the basis of a large corpus of over five thousand texts from the most important weekly magazines (Börse Online, Der Aktionär, Focus Money) it is investigated to what extent this text genre meets reader expectations. Investment recommendations show a potentially complex pragmatic structure including, among others, a headline, an evaluation of relevant arguments (pros and cons) and the operative instruction (buy/sell/hold). However, crucial elements may be missing or even give conflicting hints concerning the investment decision. Moreover, operative instructions often tend to be formulated as rather vague indirect speech acts, limiting the overall pragmatic user-friendliness. These apparent inconsistencies can be put down to a secondary pragmatic goal from the perspective of the writer: not only to give good advice, but also not to be held accountable for bad advice

Die semanto-pragmatische Dimension der Grammatik: wie DaF-Übungsgrammatiken damit umgehen (sollten)

Neben der formbezogenen Dimension hat Grammatik eine relevante funktionale Dimension, die eine situationsgerechte kommunikative Verwendung der verschiedenen grammatischen Strukturen ermöglicht, d. h. formale Kategorien dienen dazu, auf pragmatischer Ebene Sprecherintentionen zu realisieren und auf semantischer Ebene Inhalte zu differenzieren. Wie gehen nun die gängigen DaF-Übungsgrammatiken mit nicht-formbezogenen Aspekten der Grammatik um? Im vorliegenden Beitrag wird diese Frage auf der Grundlage eines Korpus von 15 Übungsgrammatiken für Fortgeschrittene untersucht, wobei zehn grammatische Phänomene unter die Lupe genommen werden, die verschiedene Bereiche der Grammatik des Deutschen abdecken sowie bekannte und weniger bekannte Lernschwierigkeiten darstellen: nominale Komposition; Akkusativ/Dativ-Wechselpräpositionen; Zukunftstempora Futur I und Präsens; Vergangenheitstempora Perfekt und Präteritum; Modi der indirekten Rede Konjunktiv I, Konjunktiv II und Indikativ; Aktiv und Passiv; Funktionsverbgefüge; Partizipialattribute; Wortstellung im Mittelfeld; Besetzung des Nachfelds. Als wichtigstes Ergebnis dieser zehn exemplarischen Fallstudien lässt sich festhalten, dass die Erklärungen in den Übungsgrammatiken bezüglich der semanto-pragmatischen Dimension dieser Phänomene inhaltlich nur teilweise adäquat erscheinen, da oftmals notwendige Vertiefungen fehlen und die Hinweise in den einzelnen Werken sich nicht zu einer systematischen Gesamtdarstellung verdichten, die den Lernenden eine kommunikationsgerechte Verwendung von Grammatik ermöglichen würd

Das Tempussystem im Deutschen: linguistische und didaktische Überlegungen

The paper investigates the six German tenses Präsens, Präteritum, Perfekt, Plusquamperfekt, Futur I, and Futur II in the perspective of temporal semantics, i.e. their correlation to the three categories present reference, past reference and future reference. It is outlined how 24 established didactic grammars of German as a foreign language describe the semantics of the German tense system. Since the given explanations are not free of inaccuracies and misleading characterizations, several didactic proposals are advanced

Die Kodierung der Vergangenheit im Deutschen und Italienischen: Tempora im Vergleich

German and Italian are characterized by a different number of past tenses: in German Perfekt, Präteritum and Plusquamperfekt; in Italian, passato prossimo, passato remoto, imperfetto, trapassato prossimo and trapassato remoto. This paper deals with the tenses of the “simple” past and examines differences and similarities in a corpus of business texts. While the German past tenses have been studied in detail,1 the Italian ones have received relatively little attention.2 The past tenses in German and in Italian are first presented primarily from a semanto-pragmatic perspective (paragraph 1 and paragraph 2). Then, the main differences and common features of the respective tense systems are worked out (paragraph 3). The description of the corpus (4) is followed by a detailed contrastive analysis (5). Finally, there is a detailed examination of the desemantisation of the tenses in specific contexts (6)

Perfekt e Präteritum del tedesco a confronto con i tempi italiani del passato. Alcuni esempi dal linguaggio economico

Il contributo mette a confronto i tempi Perfekt e Präteritum del tedesco con i tempi italiani imperfetto, passato remoto e passato prossimo. In entrambe le lingue gli eventi passati possono essere espressi con tempi verbali sintetici e analitici, tempi associati con forme di comunicazione orale o scritta, tempi con diversa distribuzione regionale, tempi marcati e tempi non marcati. La differenza principale tra i due sistemi verbali del passato sta nel fatto che in italiano l'aspetto svolge un ruolo fondamentale, mentre in tedesco no. Somiglianze e differenze tra le due lingue sono analizzate sulla base di un corpus di testi della lingua dell'economia, traduzioni in tedesco e in italiano a partire dallo stesso testo fonte in inglese americano. In questo modo è possibile confrontare l'uso dei tempi del passato nelle due lingue in contesti identici senza interferenze traduttive dirette.The study opposes the German past tenses 'Perfekt' (sie ist gegangen) and 'Präteritum' (sie ging) to the Italian tenses 'imperfetto' (lei andava), 'pas-sato remoto' (lei andò) and 'passato prossimo' (lei è andata). In both lan-guages there are synthetic and analytic tenses, tenses associated with written or oral forms of communication, tenses with different regional distribution, marked and unmarked tenses. The main difference between the two tense systems consists in the fact that in Italian aspect plays a crucial role, but not in German. Similarities and differences between the two languages are shown on the basis of a corpus of economic texts. These texts are translations into German and Italian from the same source texts belonging to American English. Thus it is possible to compare the use of past tenses in both languages in identical contexts without direct translational interferences

Die Aktienempfehlung als Handlungsanweisung für den Anleger: Eine pragmatische Perspektive auf Börsenmagazine

The paper deals with stock recommendations in several German investment magazines. To begin with, the stock recommendation is outlined as a journalistic text genre, then it is seen within the framework of speech act theory as a particular type of directive act. Core of the study is the pragmalinguistic analysis of 300 texts from the years during the time between 2015 and 2018. The textual and argumentative structure shows a continuum from merely informative to clearly directive, i.e. from an indirect to a direct speech act. Surprisingly, only a minority of the texts conveys an explicit instruction for the investor. In that regard several lex-ical and syntactic means seem relevant for emphasizing or weakening the recommendation: on the lexical level for example reference to the risks of investment or limitation to a specific type of investor, on the syntactic level the use of certain modal verbs, tenses, or connectives

Il participio attributivo nelle grammatiche didattiche del tedesco L2

Il contributo analizza il modo in cui alcune grammatiche del tedesco L2 di livello intermedio e/o avanzato trattano il tema del participio attributivo esteso (das vor kurzem veröffentlichte Buch 'il libro che è stato pubblicato recentemente'). Si tratta di una costruzione piuttosto articolata e complessa, caratteristica della lingua tedesca scritta di livello formale, che non trova corrispondenza in numerose lingue, quali ad esempio l’italiano. Tale struttura causa spesso difficoltà al discente sia in fase ricettiva che produttiva, rappresentando un argomento di rilievo nell'ambito della didattica del tedesco L2. Dopo una presentazione della struttura in ottica didattico-contrastiva, viene analizzata in dettaglio la trattazione del participio attributivo esteso in 11 grammatiche didattiche del tedesco di ampia diffusione sulla base di parametri morfosintattici, semantici e testuali. Il contributo si conclude con alcune proposte didattiche.The paper investigates the expanded attributive participle in German, focusing on the question how this construction is dealt with in didactic grammars for foreign learners. This complex construction is typical of formal written language and constitutes a difficulty for foreign learners both in comprehension and production processes (das vor kurzem veröffentlichte Buch 'the book that has been recently published'). The research is based on a corpus of eleven widely used grammars and discusses their description and explanation of the expanded attributive participle on morphosyntactic, semantic and textual grounds. Some suggestions for a successful didactics complete the discussion