Changing conventions in English-German translations of popular scientific texts

Svenja Kranich | University of Hamburg, Germany

Juliane House | University of Hamburg, Germany

Viktor Becher | University of Hamburg, Germany

This contribution summarizes results of the project Covert Translation, where we investigated the influence of Anglophone communicative conventions on German via translation. Our hypothesis was that the prestige of English as a lingua franca and the growing number of translations from English into German leads to a decline in “cultural filtering”, i.e. a diminishing tendency of translators to adapt conventional Anglophone norms to German norms. In this way, English-German translations may introduce linguistic variation to certain target language registers, with Anglophone usage norms also spreading to non-translated German texts. We will here review a number of project studies using a corpus consisting of (1.) English popular scientific texts, (2.) their translations into German, and (3.) comparable non-translated German texts. These studies show that English-German translations are characterized by a considerable degree of source language ‘shining-through’, which has, however, only in one case led to Anglophone communicative norms spreading to non-translated German texts. We conclude that, for the popular science genre, translation-induced influence of English on German is a marginal phenomenon.

Published online: 22 August 2012
https://doi.org/10.1075/hsm.13.21kra

Cited by

Cited by other publications

No author info given

2016. In Contrastive Pragmatics and Translation [Pragmatics & Beyond New Series, 261],

Dai, Guangrong

2016. In Hybridity in Translated Chinese [New Frontiers in Translation Studies, ], ► pp. 11 ff.

Dai, Guangrong

2016. In Hybridity in Translated Chinese [New Frontiers in Translation Studies, ], ► pp. 21 ff.

House, Juliane

2015. Global English, discourse and translation. Target. International Journal of Translation Studies 27:3 ► pp. 370 ff.

House, Juliane

2018. In Pragmatics and its Interfaces [Pragmatics & Beyond New Series, 294], ► pp. 143 ff.

House, Juliane

2019. Translation as a Prime Player in Intercultural Communication. Applied Linguistics

Kruger, Haidee

2019. That Again: A Multivariate Analysis of the Factors Conditioning Syntactic Explicitness in Translated English. Across Languages and Cultures 20:1 ► pp. 1 ff.

Kruger, Haidee & Bertus van Rooy

2018. Register variation in written contact varieties of English. English World-Wide. A Journal of Varieties of English 39:2 ► pp. 214 ff.

Kühl, Karoline & Kurt Braunmüller

2014. In Stability and Divergence in Language Contact [Studies in Language Variation, 16], ► pp. 13 ff.

Malamatidou, Sofia

2016. Understanding translation as a site of language contact. Target. International Journal of Translation Studies 28:3 ► pp. 399 ff.

Malamatidou, Sofia

2017. Creativity in translation through the lens of contact linguistics: a multilingual corpus ofA Clockwork Orange. The Translator 23:3 ► pp. 292 ff.

Pang, Shuangzi & Kefei Wang

2020. Language contact through translation. Target. International Journal of Translation Studies 32:3 ► pp. 420 ff.

Scarpa, Federica

2020. In Research and Professional Practice in Specialised Translation, ► pp. 1 ff.

Scarpa, Federica

2020. In Research and Professional Practice in Specialised Translation, ► pp. 111 ff.

This list is based on CrossRef data as of 23 november 2020. 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.