Abstract: Poetry is often claimed to be untranslatable. More specifically, rendering light verse, i.e. poetic humour in another language poses serious challenges for the translator to encounter. In spite of these alleged obstacles, T. S. Eliot’s Old Possum’s Book of Practical Cats has been translated and lately retranslated into Hungarian in the form of inventive and jocular texts for children. After summarizing the theoretical aspects of poetry translation and providing a brief overview of Eliot’s collection of poems about cats, the present study aims to approach the English source text by highlighting its foregrounded elements: titles, names, and cultural realia and their Hungarian counterparts in the latest translation by Attila Havasi and Dániel Varró. PubDate: Tue, 03 Jan 2023 00:00:00 GMT
Abstract: The article pays tribute to four artists of the music scene, i.e. Bob Dylan, Bruce Springsteen, Patti Smith, and John Luther Adams. It walks in their footsteps through their autobiographies and features the major landmarks in their artistic and creative evolution. Despite the various incongruent traits in their music style, background, or gender, music autobiographies prove to be valuable assets, based on which correlations and contrasts can be elucidated, the road to growing into an artist can be followed, and the creative spirit can be grasped. We hereby conclude that autobiographies can constitute a bridge towards the artistic soul and deepen the understanding of how these musicians project themselves as performers and position themselves in society. PubDate: Tue, 03 Jan 2023 00:00:00 GMT
Abstract: The growing popularity of streaming services has led to innumerable audiovisual material available for the audience. As movies, documentaries, or TV shows are part of the entertainment industry, they aim at reaching viewers worldwide with the help of dubbed and subtitled versions. Our aim is to collect the acronyms used in the transcripts/subtitles of several American political TV shows (24, Designated Survivor, House of Cards, and The West Wing) and analyse their translated versions into Hungarian. However, the strenuous activity of opening each subtitle file one by one and browsing through them to spot and collect the acronyms and initialisms would result in countless mouse clicks. Hence, a specific software (SRT Manager) was designed to speed up the process. As the majority of definitions regarding acronyms and initialisms focus on the fact that they result from the combination of at least two capital letters, once the software gets the input (multiple subtitle files of entire seasons), it provides all the consecutive two- or more capital letter instances (with or without periods) found in the raw data, such as AA or A.A. Further statistical data (the source file of each instance, counting all unique values and numbering occurrences, and adding sample lines from the subtitle) also saves a lot of time and energy, as it can easily be exported to spreadsheet programs for further data analysis. PubDate: Tue, 03 Jan 2023 00:00:00 GMT
Abstract: Travel narratives written in the mid-nineteenth century served as valuable sources of information for the Western society regarding remote and exotic places as well as different cultures. Hungary and Transylvania became increasingly interesting and challenging destinations for British and American travellers, especially in the pre- and post-revolutionary periods. Julia Pardoe’s The City of the Magyar, or Hungary and Her Institutions in 1839–1840 (1840) and Nina Elizabeth Mazuchelli’s memoir, Magyarland (1881), provided extensive accounts of a multi-ethnic Hungary, discussing various populations as being distinct from the mainstream society, as well as their folklore, history, manners, and customs. In analysing Pardoe’s and Mazuchelli’s memoirs, I am interested in the ways in which they portray Hungarian otherness as contrasted to Western, more precisely British national ideals. Making use of the theories of imagology, I will argue that the perceptions of a national character (hetero-images) as well as the defining of the (travellers’) self against the Other (auto-images) are determined and perpetuated by cultural distinctions and by the various forms of cultural clash of the British and the East-Central European. Moreover, through a comparative approach, I will also look at the differences in the travellers’ perception of the same country but in two very different historical and political time periods: Pardoe’s journey in Hungary took place in 1840, before the War of Independence, while Mazuchelli visited the country in 1881, long after the Austro-Hungarian Compromise in 1867. The findings will indicate that the main features of the image of Hungarian national identity, as it is represented in the travelogues, are generated by the historical, cultural, and socio-political developments before and after the Hungarian War of Independence (1848–49).1 PubDate: Tue, 03 Jan 2023 00:00:00 GMT
Abstract: The language of perception, regarded from the perspective of the sensory modality principle, is common to all humans within similar cultural backgrounds. Its conceptualization, from a semantic standpoint is, however, language-specific. With this view in mind, the prime objective of this study is to investigate, from a cognitive linguistic perspective, various kinds of visual properties experienced in connection with the perceptual metaphor of LIGHT. Its cultural and emotional dimensions will be approached as an integrative part of the context provided by Anthony Doerr’s novel All the Light We Cannot See (2014). The present investigation attempts to shed “light” upon the potential embodiment of meaning assigned to the metaphors of perception in a twofold, intrafield (Matisoff 1978, Evans & Wilkins 2000) and transfield standpoint. The conceptualization of the metaphor of light is observed in a contextualized approach of a single language (English), its secondary objective being that of providing the basis for a larger cross-linguistic investigation of similar matters on English–Romanian corpora. PubDate: Tue, 03 Jan 2023 00:00:00 GMT
Abstract: The study focuses on the peculiar challenges raised by rendering one of Tibor Zalán’s plays into Romanian. We shall take into account the linguistic, aesthetic, and conceptual differences that might emerge in the Romanian translation as compared to its original. The theoretical part of the research is built upon the idea that translation implies “rewriting” (Lefevere 1992) under certain constraints. Being “refracted” texts, translations naturally include not only a change of the language but also a change of the socio-cultural context, a change of the ideology (i.e. the “world view”), and a change of the poetics of the original (Lefevere 1984: 192). Thus, the comparative analysis aims at the major changes operated by the Romanian translator while conveying certain culture-bound meanings. PubDate: Tue, 03 Jan 2023 00:00:00 GMT
Abstract: In recent years, there has been a growing body of literature focusing on teacher identity and teacher beliefs, which are key aspects in understanding classroom processes. While there is an increasing number of studies regarding the identity and beliefs of practising teachers, studies on trainees are rare, and studies aiming to compare and contrast different learning environments are even less frequent.The aim of the present study is to investigate the ways in which different socio-cultural contexts influence student teachers’ vision of their future professional identity and that of their future ideal lessons.Our participants are English-language teacher trainees from Szeged (Hungary) and Miercurea Ciuc (Romania). At the time of the data collection, they had not yet started their methodology courses or their teaching practice. As the first step of a longitudinal study, they were asked to create a visual image of their ideal future lesson by drawing or making a collage. Also, they were asked to supplement their images with a written explanation.The results indicate that pre-service teachers have very specific ideas about their ideal lessons, and their images reflect plenty of details and a great variety of different aspects. PubDate: Tue, 03 Jan 2023 00:00:00 GMT
Abstract: The present paper analyses the German–Yiddish contact variety of the first chapter of the novel Die Peschl (1969) written by the Czernowitz-born author Otto Seidmann. The novel Die Peschl is written in German; however, the discourses and inner monologues of the main character, Gitl Peschl, as well as most of the dialogues with her appear in a German–Yiddish contact variety. My contact linguistic analysis identified 25 subtypes of transference from Yiddish in the inner monologues of Gitl Peschl in the first chapter of the novel. As a result, the German–Yiddish contact variety of the first chapter of the novel Die Peschl can be classified as code mixing, with congruent lexicalization as its subcategory. Congruent lexicalization is typically the case when the languages involved in language contact exhibit a high amount of grammatical and lexical similarities. According to literary historian Hartmut Merkt, Otto Seidmann’s texts stand in the tradition of sketch writings that aim to depict the everyday life and vernacular of the Bukovinians in the first half of the 20th century. PubDate: Tue, 03 Jan 2023 00:00:00 GMT
Abstract: Following the Treaty of Trianon, in Transylvania, which had been detached from historical Hungary and attached to Romania, besides the Romanian majority, there lived a considerable Hungarian- and German-speaking minority. Although in the last two decades of the communist dictatorship – in the 70s and 80s – as a consequence of emigration to Germany, the number of ethnic Germans decreased substantially, the number of Hungarian speakers is over one million even today. Regarding the characteristics of the post-World War II literary discourse and cultural policy, in the second half of the forties, the communist power gained control over all manifestations of community life in Romania. It regulated culture and the arts, banned, abolished, or restructured all forums that had enjoyed some kind of independence, and completely revised the literary and artistic canon. In this era, the discourse emphasizing the aspects of revolutionary transformation and radical policy change decisively builds on the enemy image; the fault-line between past and present and the necessity of continuous political struggle prevail in both poetry and prose. In order to achieve the intended social goals, this kind of communist sacrifice ethics regards the annihilation of resisters, protesters, and even of the internal opposition not only as a possibility but as an assumed necessity. This paper aims to present the ideological/political and aesthetic/poetic tendencies that determined Transylvanian Hungarian literature and cultural policy from the mid-40s until the end of 20th century. PubDate: Tue, 03 Jan 2023 00:00:00 GMT
Abstract: Christa Wolf was born in 1929 in a country that shortly thereafter had to end its existence. The famous German writer then studied, lived, and wrote in another system, which in turn was dissolved after decades. Such events have a dramatic effect on the life of an individual. The paper attempts to identify some features related to writing and identity in Wolf’s novel Nachdenken über Christa T (Reflections on Christa T.). In her texts, the author writes about her characters who encounter existential contradictions: on the one hand, there is a totalitarian system in which human beings have to survive; on the other hand, there is Wolf’s protagonist who tries to locate his or her individuality and thus create an ethic of his/her life. Christa Wolf’s analysis of identity is focused on the attempt to be authentic in a milieu that gives her few opportunities for development. Wolf’s writing describes our world. The texts written in the 60s, 70s, and 80s are still full of relevance today. By reading Christa Wolf, we discover a system full of violence, where the individual develops strategies for survival. The author suggests an existential recipe: through critical questioning and through a meticulous analysis of our own self, we are able to find a solution for ourselves and for others. PubDate: Tue, 03 Jan 2023 00:00:00 GMT
Abstract: In critical sociolinguistics, language is viewed as a fundamentally social phenomenon that is defined discursively, rather than in terms of individual beliefs and attitudes, and because linguistic practices are themselves intersubjective. Moreover, the broader cultural, historical, and political aspects have also become relevant in the study of language, requiring new ways of addressing sociolinguistic issues. Linguistic ethnography may be a central tool in this inquiry, as it looks at everyday practices in order to understand wider social structures. In this paper, I argue that a festival as a place of encounters provides an adequate context for such research. After discussing the different concepts of the field in doing ethnographic work, I examine the online presence of the festival in question. Tusványos is an event organized in Transylvania every year, with the intention of bringing together Hungarian participants from Hungary and Romania, as well as Romanians. PubDate: Tue, 03 Jan 2023 00:00:00 GMT
Abstract: The paper presents the results of a research project that aimed to identify the explicit and implicit language ideologies of a group of Hungarian interpreters from Transylvania or of Transylvanian origin, now living and working in Romania and in Hungary. During the online focus group meetings, the participants reflected on their own professional and linguistic practices and experiences, talking about their stories of individual language socialization and providing detailed career narratives. The study seeks to identify the interpreters’ explicit and implicit language ideologies in the context of their working languages, their attitudes towards these languages, towards the standard and the non-standard varieties, as well as their experiences connected to these languages in the light of the quality assurance expectations formulated regarding their activities as professional language service providers. PubDate: Tue, 03 Jan 2023 00:00:00 GMT
Abstract: The European Council has been instrumental in the standardization of language competence levels and certifications with the guidelines provided in the Common European Framework of Reference for Languages (CEFR) published in 2001 and later reviewed in 2020 with the Companion Volume with New Descriptors (CEFRCV). Cambridge Assessment English and Trinity College are two of the highest regarded institutions at the international level that grant their language certificates following the language competence levels provided by the CEFR. For this reason, the current study is grounded on the conviction that those certificates should meet certain principles of the Framework as a form of guarantee that they are assessing the CEFR level correctly. In particular, this paper focuses on the speaking skill and the rubrics of assessment used by the two aforementioned institutions. The rubrics of Trinity and Cambridge for the assessment of the oral production at the B2 CEFR level were considered for the purposes of this study – in particular, the rubrics that assess the oral production in the Integrated Skills in English (ISE-II) exam and in the First Certificate in English (B2 First). With a qualitative document research approach, this study analyses these rubrics in order to determine to what extent they respect the criteria established by the CEFR. PubDate: Fri, 23 Dec 2022 00:00:00 GMT
Abstract: Digital competence plays an essential role in the work of teachers in general, and it has its specific challenges regarding language teachers. In their future profession, teachers will need to be able to respond to challenges of the digital world and to develop 21st-century competencies in a conscious, goal-oriented way supported by digital tools. Our survey proposes to map the level of development of digital competence among first-year translation and interpretation students, also enrolled in language teacher training. The tool of the survey was a questionnaire. In compiling the questions, we relied on the digital competence elements of the five competence areas of the European Union DigComp 2.1 reference framework. The results suggest that students’ digital competence level is advanced, but there are areas and competences that require targeted intervention. PubDate: Fri, 23 Dec 2022 00:00:00 GMT
Abstract: The study of the Romanian language and literature is a compulsory subject for students of Hungarian minority in Romania. However, the most effective language learning methods and paradigms take into account and exploit students’ language awareness and linguistic repertoire. Such a didactic approach builds on students’ language skills and teaches children to use their language resources through teaching situations embedded in everyday school life that focus on observing and comparing different languages. In recent years, there have been several attempts to bring about a paradigm shift in the teaching of the Romanian language and allow Hungarian students to learn Romanian as a foreign language. However, a significant shift can be observed between the levels and contents of the 4th-and 5th-grade textbooks, causing serious difficulties for 5th graders. Our study presents the initial stage of a textbook analysis. We examine the extent to which the available textbooks for the 5th grade follow the methodological changes in communicative and post-communicative language teaching and the extent to which they take advantage of the language opportunities provided by students’ linguistic repertoire. PubDate: Fri, 23 Dec 2022 00:00:00 GMT
Abstract: The knowledge of medium-strength and field-specific collocations is a prerequisite for sounding native-like and as such an essential skill to have for future translators. While students are usually familiar with the use of idioms and fixed expressions, they may struggle with recognizing and also producing collocations, especially the ones they do not encounter with enough frequency. They may tend to overuse certain common word combinations and often create constructions through false analogy that result in unnatural sounding language. In order to acquire collocations, students need to notice them first – noticing, either incidental or guided, is considered to be an essential step in this process. After presenting some of the factors that hinder the accidental noticing of collocations, which also motivates the necessity for the teacher’s guidance, the paper gives examples of exercises that can help to draw students’ attention to collocations. An important objective is to raise students’ collocational awareness and also to motivate them to use resources that allow the noticing of collocations (collocation dictionaries, electronic databases, electronic corpora). A task-based approach as understood by Ellis (2003) combined with the theoretical considerations of the lexical approach (Lewis 1993) can be suitable for this purpose; the exercises presented are based on general and also semi-specialized texts and target students studying translation and working with the Hungarian–English language combination. PubDate: Fri, 23 Dec 2022 00:00:00 GMT
Abstract: The paper exemplifies a unique attempt to trace the evolution of the preposition and the adverb ABOUT as initial and transposed categories. The study focuses on the development of both interwoven categories since 850 and up to the early 21st century and covers 16 time spans. The paper proves that despite being registered during 850–950 as the representative of both categories, ABOUT initially represented the category of preposition. The research showcases that since its functional transposition in Old English, the category of the adverb ABOUT has been undergoing a continuous decrease, which is significantly enhanced in the second half of Late Modern English and reaches its peak in the early 21st century. The reasons for the growth of the preposition ABOUT lie not in the phenomenon of transposition but in the emergence of a new function: ‘in reference to’, which developed in Early Modern English and provided the impetus for a further increase of the preposition ABOUT. PubDate: Fri, 23 Dec 2022 00:00:00 GMT
Abstract: Landscape can be seen as a set of signs, landscape is foreground rather than background, and signs are semiotic items rather than just forms of public signage (Pennycook 2021), therefore the present research moves away from the traditional, text-centred approach of landscape analysis in order to examine not only the linguistic signs but the non-linguistic elements as artefacts, which take place in the brand identity construction of a local small and medium-sized enterprise (SME). The article argues that these elements as assembling artefacts become parts of semiotic assemblages inhabiting the space and represent a key feature of brand identity construction with a focus on the commodification of languages, cultures, and identities. The data consist of observation notes, photographs, and interviews obtained from an ethnographic fieldwork in Sfântu Gheorghe, Romania. The analysis presents a case study based on the concept of semiotic assemblages. The assemblage of linguistic and other resources, such as the smell of smoked meat products, the tune of Szekler folk songs, together with assembling artefacts such as sausages and other Szekler products attract customers to participate in meaning making. The effects generated by an assemblage have the ability to make something happen, in our case attract customers to SMEs. PubDate: Fri, 23 Dec 2022 00:00:00 GMT
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