This paper aims to highlight the newest approaches to the study of the formation and evolution of... more This paper aims to highlight the newest approaches to the study of the formation and evolution of neological units within specialised languages, starting from the presentations and discussions held during the seminar Neology and Specialised Translation, which took place in Brussels on 29 April 2011. The event was organised in partnership by the TERMISTI Centre of Applied Linguistics within the Higher Institute of Translators and Interpreters of Haute Ecole de Bruxelles and by the Centrum voor Vaktaal en Communicatie within the Erasmus Hogeschool of Brussels and was attended by first-rank specialists in the fields of terminology, translation and applied linguistics, such as John Humbley, Gisle Andersen, Antoinette Renouf, M.T. Cabre or Rita Temmerman. Among the notions and concepts analysed by the speakers and the participants were the distinctions neology of origin – neology of transfer, translational neology – official neology or term candidate – term, procedures such as borrowing ...
Drawing on a small corpus of news items referring to the Ukraine crisis, translated from English ... more Drawing on a small corpus of news items referring to the Ukraine crisis, translated from English into Romanian, this article aims to sketch a typology of the main term categories and terminologies present in the discourse of international relations as reflected in the news and to explore how they are usually dealt with in translation. Appellations and individual concepts form an important part of the language used in world news, whereas the terms referring to national security and the military are omnipresent. As far as translation is concerned, metonymic substitution, i.e. translating an individual concept by a related entity (e.g. Moscow for Russia or the Russian government) is a common procedure and an integral part of the transediting process undergone by these texts. Although subtle, apparently innocuous choices in the translation of some lexical items may help impose a distorted view on the events described.
When negotiating, people have economic as well noneconomic, subjective concerns. This study is an... more When negotiating, people have economic as well noneconomic, subjective concerns. This study is an exploratory investigation into the objective and subjective factors influencing employment contract negotiations and the willingness to interact in future business negotiations in the case of Romanian IT employees and recruiters. The study draws on qualitative data collection and analysis methods, i.e. semi-structured interviews with 10 participants, projective techniques and content analysis. At the time, 5 of the participants held recruitment and contracting HR roles, and 5 were working as employees (programmers, business analysts, IT project managers). They all had a recent working contract negotiation experience (less than one year ago) in the IT industry. Using the principles of corpus linguistics and the methods specific to discourse and critical discourse analysis, our study highlights some of the factors taken into account by Romanian IT employees and recruiters in employment co...
Journal for The Study of Religions and Ideologies, 2017
Drawing on a corpus of reader comments posted to the news reports about the Colectiv fire on the ... more Drawing on a corpus of reader comments posted to the news reports about the Colectiv fire on the Gandul daily website, this article investigates how "the void signifier" People is disputed between ideological and mythical thought in a moment of political and societal crisis. The comments were made by readers to a series of 578 news reports and editorials. Our study aims to inquire whether the figure of the People keeps its resourcefulness in an online conversational discourse regime. Particularly, we are interested in the way common people devise themselves as the People by mobilizing a specific political mythology established by both lay (people's sanctity/ unity/ homogeneity/ purity; national mission; genuine Latin origin; resurrection of legendary times/ figures) and religious tradition (Orthodox church as founder of Romanian nation, sacredness of political realm, divine qualities of the nation), and recently, by an utopian approach to empowering technological revo...
Starting from a parallel corpus of general use texts, this article investigates what kind of regu... more Starting from a parallel corpus of general use texts, this article investigates what kind of regularities are discernible in the formation of the terms used in the Romanian language of information and communication technology (ICT). After a brief presentation of the corpus that supported this research, the article begins with an introduction to the distinction made between the processes of primary and secondary term formation and considers it in relation to the concepts of translation regularities and norms as theorized by Gideon Toury. Starting from a concise examination of the sentence-based turn in translation studies, the final part of the article analyzes the main strategies used in the secondary formation of Romanian ICT terms (borrowing, loan translation, hybrid formation, and translation proper) and attempts to determine which of them could be seen as regularities that ampler studies could confirm as norms in this process.
The assertion of the centrality and supremacy of man, or rather, of the idea(l) of humanity, duri... more The assertion of the centrality and supremacy of man, or rather, of the idea(l) of humanity, during the Renaissance period, inevitably entailed the repudiation of the animal and the beginning of the great human-animal divide. What was seen, at the time, as the re-birth of man, was also the birth of a rampant anthropocentrism which, until the recent so-called “animal turn”“ in critical and literary studies went unquestioned. Taking this into account, one would expect to find an almost exclusive focus on the human or what is/was perceived as being human in most works from that period. Yet, surprisingly, throughout Shakespeare‘s plays, one encounters a plethora of figures of animality leaping, running, crawling, flying, swimming, or advancing, as Derrida would say, “à pas de loup”“. From dogs, bears, lions, apes and foxes to birds, fish, worms and reptiles, Shakespeare the humanist paradoxically unfolds a veritable bestiary of nonhuman presences. Using corpus-based analysis that focuse...
Both the national and the international media chronicled the fire that broke at the “Colectiv” Cl... more Both the national and the international media chronicled the fire that broke at the “Colectiv” Club during a rock concert on 30 October 2015 as the most resounding topic on the last year’s map of events. Its impact can be measured not only in terms of immediate victims (65 deaths), but also in terms of collateral effects such as street protests, political changes, and public scandals. In the event’s aftermath, thousands of protesters marched through Bucharest several days in a row and adopted, at the discourse level, a position against the state system. Their claims led to a change in the composition of the Romanian Government, who lost their credibility and were forced to move from a political to a technocrat legitimization. The situation also escalated to a national scandal because the Orthodox prelates’ official positions did not meet the majority’s projections of freedom. Moreover, within the public space, the 65 victims reopened the discussions about the abuses of the ex-minist...
The research devoted to special languages as well as the activities carried out in specialized tr... more The research devoted to special languages as well as the activities carried out in specialized translation classes tend to focus primarily on one-word or multi-word terminological units. However, a very important part in the making of specialist registers and texts is played by specialised collocations, i.e. relatively stable word combinations that do not designate concepts but are nevertheless of frequent use in a given field of activity. This is why helping students acquire competences relative to the identification and processing of collocations should become an important objective in specialised translation classes. An easily accessible and dependable resource that may be successfully used to this purpose is represented by corpora and corpus analysis tools, whose usefulness in translator training has been highlighted by numerous studies. This article proposes a series of practical, task-based activities-developed with the help of a small-size parallel corpus of specialised texts...
Contrastive markers are one of the richest groups of discourse markers in Romance languages. Ther... more Contrastive markers are one of the richest groups of discourse markers in Romance languages. There are several conjunctions and other connectives that can express various types of contrast both at the text level and at the sentence level. In this paper, the main contrastive markers of Spanish, Catalan, Italian and Romanian will be classified and compared as for form, lexical base (or source) and meaning, with the aim of providing a cross-linguistic description of the way in which this class of discourse relations is signaled in these four different Romance languages. Two general meanings will be considered, namely, non-exclusive contrast (including weak contrast, opposition, concessive opposition, and conditional opposition) and exclusive contrast. Our analysis reveals similarities across languages, which go back to common origins, as well as important differences, derived from the fact that each language has developed a paradigmatic system that shows interesting divergences in use.
Contrastive markers are one of the richest groups of discourse markers in Romance languages. Ther... more Contrastive markers are one of the richest groups of discourse markers in Romance languages. There are several conjunctions and other connectives that can express various types of contrast both at the text level and at the sentence level. In this paper, the main contrastive markers of Spanish, Catalan, Italian and Romanian will be classified and compared as for form, lexical base (or source) and meaning, with the aim of providing a cross-linguistic description of the way in which this class of discourse relations is signaled in these four different Romance languages. Two general meanings will be considered, namely, non-exclusive contrast (including weak contrast, opposition, concessive opposition, and conditional opposition) and exclusive contrast. Our analysis reveals similarities across languages, which go back to common origins, as well as important differences, derived from the fact that each language has developed a paradigmatic system that shows interesting divergences in use.
The assertion of the centrality and supremacy of man, or rather, of the idea(l) of humanity, duri... more The assertion of the centrality and supremacy of man, or rather, of the idea(l) of humanity, during the Renaissance period, inevitably entailed the repudiation of the animal and the beginning of the great human-animal divide. What was seen, at the time, as the rebirth of man, was also the birth of a rampant anthropocentrism which, until the recent animal turn in critical and literary studies went unquestioned. Taking this into account, one would expect to find an almost exclusive focus on the human or what is/was perceived as being human in most works from that period. Yet, surprisingly, throughout Shakespeare's plays, one encounters a plethora of figures of animality leaping, running, crawling, flying, swimming, or advancing, as Derrida would say, ―à pas de loup. From dogs, bears, lions, apes and foxes to birds, fish, worms and reptiles, Shakespeare the humanist paradoxically unfolds a veritable bestiary of nonhuman presences. Using corpus-based analysis that focuses on animal similes built with the preposition "like" and a critical angle largely informed by posthumanist theory, we take a closer look at the forms, roles and functions of both nonhuman and human animality in Shakespeare, as well as the intricate relationship between anthropocentrism and anthropomorphism.
The research devoted to special languages as well as the activities carried out in specialized tr... more The research devoted to special languages as well as the activities carried out in specialized translation classes tend to focus primarily on one-word or multi-word terminological units. However, a very important part in the making of specialist registers and texts is played by specialised collocations, i.e. relatively stable word combinations that do not designate concepts but are nevertheless of frequent use in a given field of activity. This is why helping students acquire competences relative to the identification and processing of collocations should become an important objective in specialised translation classes. An easily accessible and dependable resource that may be successfully used to this purpose is represented by corpora and corpus analysis tools, whose usefulness in translator training has been highlighted by numerous studies. This article proposes a series of practical, task-based activities—developed with the help of a small-size parallel corpus of specialised texts—that aim to raise the translation trainees' awareness of the collocations present in specialised texts and to provide suggestions about their processing in translation.
Year-Book of Petre Andrei University of Iasi, 2015
Drawing on a small corpus of news items referring to the Ukraine crisis, translated from English ... more Drawing on a small corpus of news items referring to the Ukraine crisis, translated from English into Romanian, this article aims to sketch a typology of the main term categories and terminologies present in the discourse of international relations as reflected in the news and to explore how they are usually dealt with in translation. Appellations and individual concepts form an important part of the language used in world news, whereas the terms referring to national security and the military are omnipresent. As far as translation is concerned, metonymic substitution, i.e. translating an individual concept by a related entity (e.g. Moscow for Russia or the Russian government) is a common procedure and an integral part of the transediting process undergone by these texts. Although subtle, apparently innocuous choices in the translation of some lexical items may help impose a distorted view on the events described.
This paper aims to highlight the newest approaches to the study of the formation and evolution of... more This paper aims to highlight the newest approaches to the study of the formation and evolution of neological units within specialised languages, starting from the presentations and discussions held during the seminar Neology and Specialised Translation, which took place in Brussels on 29 April 2011. The event was organised in partnership by the TERMISTI Centre of Applied Linguistics within the Higher Institute of Translators and Interpreters of Haute Ecole de Bruxelles and by the Centrum voor Vaktaal en Communicatie within the Erasmus Hogeschool of Brussels and was attended by first-rank specialists in the fields of terminology, translation and applied linguistics, such as John Humbley, Gisle Andersen, Antoinette Renouf, M.T. Cabre or Rita Temmerman. Among the notions and concepts analysed by the speakers and the participants were the distinctions neology of origin – neology of transfer, translational neology – official neology or term candidate – term, procedures such as borrowing ...
Drawing on a small corpus of news items referring to the Ukraine crisis, translated from English ... more Drawing on a small corpus of news items referring to the Ukraine crisis, translated from English into Romanian, this article aims to sketch a typology of the main term categories and terminologies present in the discourse of international relations as reflected in the news and to explore how they are usually dealt with in translation. Appellations and individual concepts form an important part of the language used in world news, whereas the terms referring to national security and the military are omnipresent. As far as translation is concerned, metonymic substitution, i.e. translating an individual concept by a related entity (e.g. Moscow for Russia or the Russian government) is a common procedure and an integral part of the transediting process undergone by these texts. Although subtle, apparently innocuous choices in the translation of some lexical items may help impose a distorted view on the events described.
When negotiating, people have economic as well noneconomic, subjective concerns. This study is an... more When negotiating, people have economic as well noneconomic, subjective concerns. This study is an exploratory investigation into the objective and subjective factors influencing employment contract negotiations and the willingness to interact in future business negotiations in the case of Romanian IT employees and recruiters. The study draws on qualitative data collection and analysis methods, i.e. semi-structured interviews with 10 participants, projective techniques and content analysis. At the time, 5 of the participants held recruitment and contracting HR roles, and 5 were working as employees (programmers, business analysts, IT project managers). They all had a recent working contract negotiation experience (less than one year ago) in the IT industry. Using the principles of corpus linguistics and the methods specific to discourse and critical discourse analysis, our study highlights some of the factors taken into account by Romanian IT employees and recruiters in employment co...
Journal for The Study of Religions and Ideologies, 2017
Drawing on a corpus of reader comments posted to the news reports about the Colectiv fire on the ... more Drawing on a corpus of reader comments posted to the news reports about the Colectiv fire on the Gandul daily website, this article investigates how "the void signifier" People is disputed between ideological and mythical thought in a moment of political and societal crisis. The comments were made by readers to a series of 578 news reports and editorials. Our study aims to inquire whether the figure of the People keeps its resourcefulness in an online conversational discourse regime. Particularly, we are interested in the way common people devise themselves as the People by mobilizing a specific political mythology established by both lay (people's sanctity/ unity/ homogeneity/ purity; national mission; genuine Latin origin; resurrection of legendary times/ figures) and religious tradition (Orthodox church as founder of Romanian nation, sacredness of political realm, divine qualities of the nation), and recently, by an utopian approach to empowering technological revo...
Starting from a parallel corpus of general use texts, this article investigates what kind of regu... more Starting from a parallel corpus of general use texts, this article investigates what kind of regularities are discernible in the formation of the terms used in the Romanian language of information and communication technology (ICT). After a brief presentation of the corpus that supported this research, the article begins with an introduction to the distinction made between the processes of primary and secondary term formation and considers it in relation to the concepts of translation regularities and norms as theorized by Gideon Toury. Starting from a concise examination of the sentence-based turn in translation studies, the final part of the article analyzes the main strategies used in the secondary formation of Romanian ICT terms (borrowing, loan translation, hybrid formation, and translation proper) and attempts to determine which of them could be seen as regularities that ampler studies could confirm as norms in this process.
The assertion of the centrality and supremacy of man, or rather, of the idea(l) of humanity, duri... more The assertion of the centrality and supremacy of man, or rather, of the idea(l) of humanity, during the Renaissance period, inevitably entailed the repudiation of the animal and the beginning of the great human-animal divide. What was seen, at the time, as the re-birth of man, was also the birth of a rampant anthropocentrism which, until the recent so-called “animal turn”“ in critical and literary studies went unquestioned. Taking this into account, one would expect to find an almost exclusive focus on the human or what is/was perceived as being human in most works from that period. Yet, surprisingly, throughout Shakespeare‘s plays, one encounters a plethora of figures of animality leaping, running, crawling, flying, swimming, or advancing, as Derrida would say, “à pas de loup”“. From dogs, bears, lions, apes and foxes to birds, fish, worms and reptiles, Shakespeare the humanist paradoxically unfolds a veritable bestiary of nonhuman presences. Using corpus-based analysis that focuse...
Both the national and the international media chronicled the fire that broke at the “Colectiv” Cl... more Both the national and the international media chronicled the fire that broke at the “Colectiv” Club during a rock concert on 30 October 2015 as the most resounding topic on the last year’s map of events. Its impact can be measured not only in terms of immediate victims (65 deaths), but also in terms of collateral effects such as street protests, political changes, and public scandals. In the event’s aftermath, thousands of protesters marched through Bucharest several days in a row and adopted, at the discourse level, a position against the state system. Their claims led to a change in the composition of the Romanian Government, who lost their credibility and were forced to move from a political to a technocrat legitimization. The situation also escalated to a national scandal because the Orthodox prelates’ official positions did not meet the majority’s projections of freedom. Moreover, within the public space, the 65 victims reopened the discussions about the abuses of the ex-minist...
The research devoted to special languages as well as the activities carried out in specialized tr... more The research devoted to special languages as well as the activities carried out in specialized translation classes tend to focus primarily on one-word or multi-word terminological units. However, a very important part in the making of specialist registers and texts is played by specialised collocations, i.e. relatively stable word combinations that do not designate concepts but are nevertheless of frequent use in a given field of activity. This is why helping students acquire competences relative to the identification and processing of collocations should become an important objective in specialised translation classes. An easily accessible and dependable resource that may be successfully used to this purpose is represented by corpora and corpus analysis tools, whose usefulness in translator training has been highlighted by numerous studies. This article proposes a series of practical, task-based activities-developed with the help of a small-size parallel corpus of specialised texts...
Contrastive markers are one of the richest groups of discourse markers in Romance languages. Ther... more Contrastive markers are one of the richest groups of discourse markers in Romance languages. There are several conjunctions and other connectives that can express various types of contrast both at the text level and at the sentence level. In this paper, the main contrastive markers of Spanish, Catalan, Italian and Romanian will be classified and compared as for form, lexical base (or source) and meaning, with the aim of providing a cross-linguistic description of the way in which this class of discourse relations is signaled in these four different Romance languages. Two general meanings will be considered, namely, non-exclusive contrast (including weak contrast, opposition, concessive opposition, and conditional opposition) and exclusive contrast. Our analysis reveals similarities across languages, which go back to common origins, as well as important differences, derived from the fact that each language has developed a paradigmatic system that shows interesting divergences in use.
Contrastive markers are one of the richest groups of discourse markers in Romance languages. Ther... more Contrastive markers are one of the richest groups of discourse markers in Romance languages. There are several conjunctions and other connectives that can express various types of contrast both at the text level and at the sentence level. In this paper, the main contrastive markers of Spanish, Catalan, Italian and Romanian will be classified and compared as for form, lexical base (or source) and meaning, with the aim of providing a cross-linguistic description of the way in which this class of discourse relations is signaled in these four different Romance languages. Two general meanings will be considered, namely, non-exclusive contrast (including weak contrast, opposition, concessive opposition, and conditional opposition) and exclusive contrast. Our analysis reveals similarities across languages, which go back to common origins, as well as important differences, derived from the fact that each language has developed a paradigmatic system that shows interesting divergences in use.
The assertion of the centrality and supremacy of man, or rather, of the idea(l) of humanity, duri... more The assertion of the centrality and supremacy of man, or rather, of the idea(l) of humanity, during the Renaissance period, inevitably entailed the repudiation of the animal and the beginning of the great human-animal divide. What was seen, at the time, as the rebirth of man, was also the birth of a rampant anthropocentrism which, until the recent animal turn in critical and literary studies went unquestioned. Taking this into account, one would expect to find an almost exclusive focus on the human or what is/was perceived as being human in most works from that period. Yet, surprisingly, throughout Shakespeare's plays, one encounters a plethora of figures of animality leaping, running, crawling, flying, swimming, or advancing, as Derrida would say, ―à pas de loup. From dogs, bears, lions, apes and foxes to birds, fish, worms and reptiles, Shakespeare the humanist paradoxically unfolds a veritable bestiary of nonhuman presences. Using corpus-based analysis that focuses on animal similes built with the preposition "like" and a critical angle largely informed by posthumanist theory, we take a closer look at the forms, roles and functions of both nonhuman and human animality in Shakespeare, as well as the intricate relationship between anthropocentrism and anthropomorphism.
The research devoted to special languages as well as the activities carried out in specialized tr... more The research devoted to special languages as well as the activities carried out in specialized translation classes tend to focus primarily on one-word or multi-word terminological units. However, a very important part in the making of specialist registers and texts is played by specialised collocations, i.e. relatively stable word combinations that do not designate concepts but are nevertheless of frequent use in a given field of activity. This is why helping students acquire competences relative to the identification and processing of collocations should become an important objective in specialised translation classes. An easily accessible and dependable resource that may be successfully used to this purpose is represented by corpora and corpus analysis tools, whose usefulness in translator training has been highlighted by numerous studies. This article proposes a series of practical, task-based activities—developed with the help of a small-size parallel corpus of specialised texts—that aim to raise the translation trainees' awareness of the collocations present in specialised texts and to provide suggestions about their processing in translation.
Year-Book of Petre Andrei University of Iasi, 2015
Drawing on a small corpus of news items referring to the Ukraine crisis, translated from English ... more Drawing on a small corpus of news items referring to the Ukraine crisis, translated from English into Romanian, this article aims to sketch a typology of the main term categories and terminologies present in the discourse of international relations as reflected in the news and to explore how they are usually dealt with in translation. Appellations and individual concepts form an important part of the language used in world news, whereas the terms referring to national security and the military are omnipresent. As far as translation is concerned, metonymic substitution, i.e. translating an individual concept by a related entity (e.g. Moscow for Russia or the Russian government) is a common procedure and an integral part of the transediting process undergone by these texts. Although subtle, apparently innocuous choices in the translation of some lexical items may help impose a distorted view on the events described.
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Papers by Sorina Ciobanu