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LINGUA INGLESEA.A. 2006-7

PROF. MARIA TERESA PRATLaurea specialistica per le Lingue Straniere per la Comunicazione

Internazionale e Lingue e culture per il Turismo

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Course programme• 60 HOURS, 10 CREDITS• IN-ITINERE EVALUATION: AT LEAST 80%

ATTENDANCE; ACTIVE PARTICIPATION; WEEKLY READING ASSIGNMENTS AND LINGUISTIC TASKS; IN-ITINERE EVALUATION + FINAL PAPER ON THE TEXTUAL ANALYSIS AND TRANSLATION OF A SPECIALIZED GENRE (It will also be possible to adopt a corpus-based methodology). THE PAPER SHOULD BE DISCUSSED DURING THE ORAL EXAM IN THE SUMMER OR IN THE AUTUMN SESSION 2007(AT THE LATEST).

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Exam programme for- non attenders (to

be agreed individually with prof. Prat) 1. The study of the three following books (If already studied, the

books should be substituted with other books from a reading list to be agreed with prof. Prat) :

• Gotti, Maurizio, (2005), Investigating Specialized discourse, Bern: Peter Lang, pp. 9-149 and chapters V,IX, XII,XIV)

• Scarpa, Federica, (2001), La traduzione specializzata. Lingue speciali e mediazione linguistica, Milano: Hoepli, pp 67-239

• Bowker Lynne and Jennifer Pearson, (2002), Working with Specialized Language, A practical guide to using corpora, Routledge, pp. 135-210

2. The translation of 6 texts from English into Italian chosen by each student, one for each of the 6 units of the course: The Press, Tourism, European and World Institutions, Institutional/social communication, Scientific/Technical writing, Academic Discourse. ( to be presented and discussed during the oral exam). For each article write a one-page introduction in English providing information about the context, the genre, some stylistic analysis and some comments on translation choices (see Scarpa’s Appendix)

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Obiettivi formativi (p. 269 della Guida 2006-7)

• Possedere una ELEVATA conoscenza di almeno due lingue di comunicazione internazionale (oltre all’italiano)

• Conoscere le tematiche culturali, storiche, economiche e sociali delle aree geografiche connesse alle lingue prescelte e alle realtà locali (cittadine, provinciali, regionali) e internazionali nelle quali si troveranno a operare

• Acquisire solide conoscenze delle discipline di base delle scienze sociali, economiche e giuridiche

• Essere in grado di utilizzare ausili informatici e telematici

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OPPORTUNITA’ LAVORATIVEGuida dello studente 2006-7 (pp. 270 272)

• MEDIATORI LINGUISTICI E CULTURALI NELLE AZIENDE ITALIANE E STRANIERE, NELLA PUBBLICA AMMINISTRAZIONE, NEGLI ENTI LOCALI;

• FUNZIONI DI ELEVATA RESPONSABILITA’ NELL’AMBITO DELLE RELAZIONI PRESSO AZIENDE ITALIANE, LA PUBBLICA AMMINISTRAZIONE, LE STRUTTURE DEL VOLONTARIATO E GLI ENTI LOCALI;

• NELLA DIREZIONE DI ORGANIZZAZIONI INTERNAZIONALI, DI SETTORI DELLA COOPERAZIONE E DEGLI AIUTI ALLO SVILUPPO;

• COME ESPERTI NELLE ATTIVITA’ DI SUPPORTO NEGLI ENTI E NELLE ISTITUZIONI IMPLICATE CON I FENOMENI DELL’INTEGRAZIONE ECONOMICA, SOCIALE E CULTURALE

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Job opportunities

• Linguistic and cultural “mediators” in companies in Italy and abroad, in the public administration and in the local government;

• Positions of responsibility in the Italian public and private sector, in international institutions and in aid agencies (NGOs, non-profit organizations, charities);

• Consultants in corporations and institutions dealing with projects of economic, social and cultural integration;

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RESOURCES• The COURSE AND THE SET BOOKS, • LETTORATI:43/S “ Lingue Straniere per la Comunicazione Internazionale” A two-hour lettorato will be given by Fiona MacWilliam on Thursday 2-4 p.m., in

Gorresio 4. starting on 1st March 2007. Students are required to enrol by going to the FIRST lesson;

Lingue e Culture per il Turismo• A two-hour lettorato will be given by Shan Hirst on Tuesday 4-6 .m. in CLIFU,

starting from Tuesday 6th March. Students are required to enrol by going to the FIRST lesson;.

• THREE TUTORS, Marco Piovaz, Maria Cristina Caimotto, Alessandra Molino, PhD students;

• SELECTED BIBLIOGRAPHY of books on specialized discourse and translation and basic reference available in the library ;

• INTERNET SELECTED WEBSITES• ELECTRONIC RESOURCES (e.g. corpora in CLIFU)• MONOLINGUAL AND BILINGUAL SPECIALIZED DICTIONARIES available in the

library and in CLIFU• DISCIPLINE EXPERTS in the faculty (e.g law, economics, tourism)

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Set Books

• Gotti, Maurizio, (2005) , Investigating Specialized discourse, Bern: Peter Lang

• Scarpa, Federica, (2001), La traduzione specializzata. Lingue speciali e mediazione linguistica, Milano: Hoepli

• Bowker Lynne and Jennifer Pearson, (2002), Working with Specialized Language, A practical guide to using corpora, Routledge

(selected chapters)

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INTERESTING QUESTIONS ON SPECIALIZED DISCOURSE

1. How different is general English from specialized English?

2. Can we talk in terms of general English versus specialized English?

3. What may make specialized discourse difficult, and for whom?

4. Are there specialized features that are common to all, or many, languages or are they typical of individual languages?

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INTRODUCTORY UNIT FROM GENERAL ENGLISH TO SPECIALIZED

LANGUAGES, OR DISCOURSE

Language for general purposes (LGP) is the language that we use every day to talk and write about ordinary events in a variety of common situations ( e.g. asking for instructions, ordering a meal, writing a letter to a friend)

Language(s) for special purposes (LSP) is used to talk and write about specialized fields of knowledge ( e.g. marketing, medicine, computing, linguistics, tourism, wine, sport)

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SOME INTERESTING DOMAINS AND GENRES (dealt with in the course)

• THE PRESS e.g. from paper to electronic newspapers • INSTITUTIONAL COMMUNICATION (e.g. health and social care

leaflets, charities websites)• TOURISM (e.g. guidebooks and websites)• EUROPEAN AND WORLD INSTITUTIONS ( e.g EC and UNICEF

websites)• SCIENTIFIC AND TECHNICAL WRITING (e.g. Medicine,

computing )• ACADEMIC DISCOURSE (e.g. abstracts, research articles)

OTHER INTERESTING AREAS (excluded from the course):• BUSINESS AND ECONOMICS ( e.g. business correspondence, e-commerce,

franchising…)• DUBBING AND SUBTITLING (e.g. films and TV fiction)• LEGAL LANGUAGE (e.g contracts, laws…)

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SPECIALIZED DISCOURSE A DIACHRONIC PERSPECTIVE

IN LINGUISTICS • Some major 20th century linguistic models have

described language as a system (De Saussure) or as an abstract mental model (Chomsky);

• 1920s and ´30s: the Prague School paid attention to the “functional style” of scientific and technical texts, often seen as ‘restricted’ and ‘inferior’ to language for general purposes and literary language;

• After The Second World War: the ‘register’ approach has stressed the linguistic features that diverge from the ‘default’ level of common language;

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SINCE THE SIXTIES

• ….there has been growing attention to the study of variation according to the USER (geographical and social) and to USE ( who speaks/writes to whom, about what and through what medium, M.A.K.Halliday’s “tenor”, “field”, “mode”); language in context; genres;

• …from focus on “terminology” to the morpho-syntactic, textual and contextual levels, from a “microlinguistic” to a “macrolinguistic” approach;

• …development of corpus-based methodology, which allows the study of authentic texts in electronic form;

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The Italian tradition in the study of specialized discourse

• Debate on terminology ( e.g.linguaggi settoriali, microlingue, sottocodici, lingue speciali, linguaggi specialisti, le lingue delle professioni)

• CERLIS (Centro di Ricerca sui Linguaggi Specialistici), Universita’ di Bergamo http://www.unibg.it/cerlis/home.htm

• See selected bibliography

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The complexity of specialized discourse

• HORIZONTAL DIMENSION: DIFFERENT FIELDS, OR DOMAINS (e.g. business, economics, new economy, finance, marketing, e-commerce, franchising)

• VERTICAL DIMENSION: a) specialist to specialist (exposition) b) specialist to specialist-to-be

(instruction) c) specialist to layperson (journalism)

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Lexical features of specialized discourse (and exceptions)

• Monoreferentiality and precision (versus ambiguity, semantic instability and lexical richness): word versus term / term and concept

e.g measles = morbillo; carbine= carabina (versus “noun phrase / noun group / syntagm” = different ways to refer to the same linguistic phenomenon)

• Lack of emotion: versus metaphors and idiomatic collocations in economy e.g. “bulls” “bears”/ a sperm bank/ a corporate raider/ spam/ to launch a $20 billion bid for

• Transparency and standardisation: versus opacity / jargon, e.g. gastroenterology / tonsillectomy / chest versus thoracic

• Conciseness e.g. Blog / AIDS versus redundancy in legal language e.g. “mutually agreed”

• Conservatism e.g “henceforth” in legal language versus lexical productivity – Netizen / netiquette

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Some frequent syntactic phenomena in specialized discourse

• Omission of phrasal elements ( e.g. instructions)• Conciseness and premodification (e.g. “a water-cooled engine/

the inflation growth rate/ a small car factory”)• Nominalization (e.g. “Discarge of the contents of the tank is

effected by a pump”)• Lexical density (e.g. high percentage of content words versus

function words in a text)• Sentence structure e.g. simple / fewer subordinate

clauses/more non-finite clauses “ The proton is the opposite of the electron, being a particle of positive electricity”. Longer and more complex structure in legal English

• Use of verb tenses (e.g. linked to the type of text, higher number of non-finite forms)

• Use of the passive form and depersonalisation e.g. “This hypothesis is confirmed by….”

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Lexical Analysis of the text “Parallel extinction risk and global distribution of languages and species”

• Monoreferentiality and precision: many specialized ( or semi-specialized ) terms referring to precise concepts e.g. biodiversity, extinction rates, background levels, species, mammals, threatened languages ( but also “endangered languages”), human densities, latitude, altitude, insularity; terms/collocations referring to academic research , e.g estimates…vary, languages are classified, apply criteria, show evidence/relationships, factors explain;

• Lack of emotion: “risk”, “threatened” and “endangered” are used in a technical sense;

• Transparency and standardisation: frequent repetition of the same technical terms/ expressions e.g. extinct/extinction, diversity, explain;

• Conciseness : e.g. biodiversity;• Conservatism : e.g. Biodiversity is a fairly recent neologism

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Lexical Analysis of the text “Parallel extinction risk and global distribution of languages and species”

• Monoreferentiality and precision: many specialized ( or semi-specialized ) terms referring to precise concepts e.g. biodiversity, extinction rates, background levels, species, mammals, threatened languages ( but also “endangered languages”), human densities, latitude, altitude, insularity; terms/collocations referring to academic research , e.g estimates…vary, languages are classified, apply criteria, show evidence/relationships, factors explain;

• Lack of emotion: “risk”, “threatened” and “endangered” are used in a technical sense;

• Transparency and standardisation: frequent repetition of the same technical terms/ expressions e.g. extinct/extinction, diversity, explain;

• Conciseness : e.g. biodiversity;• Conservatism : e.g. Biodiversity is a fairly recent neologism

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Frequent syntactical phenomena in the text “Parallel Extinction risk…”

• Omission of phrasal elements e.g. in the title• Conciseness through premodification . Many examples “

parallel/current extinction risk”, “species extinction risk”• Nominalization : both in terms of long noun phrases “estimates of the

number of threatened languages”, “internationally agreed criteria for…”and the use of nouns rather than verbs (e.g. There are global threats to biodiversity…” rather than “biodiversity is threatened globally”

• Lexical density (e.g. high percentage of content words versus grammatical words in the text)

• Sentence structure. Out of 9 sentences, only 3 of them have finite subordinate clauses.

• Use of verb tenses: frequent use of the simple present tense, few present perfect forms, several non-finite verb forms both ing-forms and past participle forms

• Frequent use of the passive form e.g. “languages have been classified” and depersonalisation e.g. “ Rare languages are more likely…”“the factors … do not explain”. There is only one first person verb form, i.e. “ here I show”

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Textual features of the Text “Parallel Extinction risk….”

Text genre: it is the introduction to a fairly specialized contribution (the subgenre of “letter”) published in the authoritative scientific journal Nature. Expert-to-expert or to a highly-educated reader

Cohesion is obtained through lexical repetition more than through anaphoric reference (e.g. “all three”), use of general words (criteria, factors) and some conjunctions (also, however, for example)

Textual structure: The text establishes the field of investigation and the key research questions. It is both informative and argumentative.

- Sentence 1 : general statement - Sentence 2 : identifying a niche for research - Sentence 3/4: acknowledging difficulties and giving an example- Sentence 5: making the research claim explicit- Sentences 6-9 expanding on the intended research

The text is built in a very clear and concise way, but does not show emotional and literary value.

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Translating texts ( or “dire quasi la stessa cosa” as U. Eco says). Some questions

• Is translation still needed, since English has become the “lingua franca” of the world?

• What is the difference between the translation of literary texts and specialized texts?

• Who are the “participants” in the process of translation?

• What makes a translation “ good”? • What are the best translation strategies? • What are the most important types of competence

and knowledge a translator should have, and the resources he/she should be familiar with?

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UNIT 1 Global news in English

• TELEVISION: e.g. BBC World, CNN• RADIO NEWS: e.g. BBC Radio World Service• NEWSPAPERS WITH A WORLD NEWS

COVERAGE ( e.g. Financial Times, Wall Street Journal)

• INTERNATIONAL EDITIONS OF NEWPAPERS AND MAGAZINES (e.g. Herald Tribune, The Economist, Newsweek)

• NEWS AGENCIES (e.g. Reuters) • INTERNET ALTERNATIVE NEWS (e.g.

personal blogs, forums, http://indymedia.org

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The British Press: from paper to electronic newspapers

•“Almost every adult in Britain reads or sees a daily newspaper and many people remain loyal to a particular paper for life”, OALD Ecyclopedic Edition, 1992 (Is it still true today?)

• Types of newspapers:• National (11) or regional / local ( very many)• Daily papers (11) versus Sunday editions (12)• Quality (‘heavies’/broadsheets): The Times ( since

1785), The Guardian (since 1825), The Daily Telegraph (since 1855), The Financial Times (1888), The Independent (1986)

• popular (tabloids, gutter press): The Sun (since 1964), The Daily Mirror ( since 1903), Daily Mail (since 1896), Daily Express ( since 1900), Daily Star (1978), Morning Star (since 1930)

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The Press in English (follows)

• THE MOST POPULAR NEWSPAPER IS The SUN (more than 3 million copies). HOWEVER, THE TRADITIONAL NEWSPAPER READERSHIP HAS BEEN DECREASING CONSIDERABLY.

• MANY BROADSHEETS HAVE RECENTLY GONE “COMPACT” AND HAVE AN ELECTRONIC VERSION

• “FREES” (FREE NEWSPAPERS DISTRIBUTED IN BIG CITIES OR IN THE UNDERGROUND e.g. Metro) ARE BECOMING VERY POPULAR.

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THE ECONOMIST

• Search for, and look up, The Economist website

• Find the following items of information: a. first date of publication b. readership c. news coverage d. “ideology” e. funding f. peculiar journalistic features

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UNIT 2 INSTITUTIONAL ENGLISH

Some SYNONYMS for this type of discourse: bureaucratic language, public service leaflets or advertising, humanitarian advertising, social communication, Il linguaggio della burocrazia, Pubblicità progresso, La lingua della pubblica amministrazione, Comunicazione sociale

• Promoters: the state, public institutions ( e.g. universities, public libraries, post offices), charities ( operational or campaigning), Nonprofit Organisations, Non-Governmental Organisations NGO, Organizzazioni senza scopo di lucro (ONLUS), Organizzazioni non governative ONG ( e.g. Amnesty International, Emergency, Medicins sans frontières), public and private corporations engaged in cause–related marketing or environmental policies…

• Receivers: citizens, consumers, supporters, members, visitors…

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INSTITUTIONAL ENGLISH (follows)

FIELDS covered: citizens’ rights and duties (e.g. pensions, taxes), the great tragedies of humanity (e.g. poverty, hunger, child mortality); health (e.g. organ donation, aviary flu), environment preservation (e.g. recycling, water), political and cultural life ( e.g. pressure groups on various issues), recreational activities ( e.g sport)…

• AIMS : fund raising, publicizing services and facilities for the community, informing and creating awareness, warning …

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INSTITUTIONAL ENGLISH (follows)

• CONTEXTS (and GENRES): paper leaflets and documents in public offices, hoardings and billboards in the streets, ads in the Press, ads on TV, films, videos, web sites…

• LINGUISTIC AND DISCOURSAL FEATURES: from clear and precise official documents to creative strategies and techniques typical of advertising.

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BUREAUCRATIC LANGUAGEEnglish versus Italian

• DEROGATORY SYNONYMS: “LEGALESE”, “BUREAUCRATESE”, “GOBBLEDYGOOK”, “OFFICIALESE”

• BUREAUCRAT versus CIVIL SERVANT• DIFFERENCES IN THE SIMPLIFICATION OF PUBLIC

DOCUMENTS IN GREAT BRITAIN AND IN ITALY :

a) historical and cultural reasons: role of Latin, late Italian unification, influence of religion

b) developments in the 20th Century; “Plain English Campaign” in Great Britain since the ‘50s - ‘70s versus “Semplificazione del linguaggio Amministrativo” since the ‘90s in Italy

c) “High-context” (a lot of information is taken for granted) versus “low-context” cultures (a lot of information is made explicit)

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Resources to understand and translate specialized discourse (see Bowker and

Pearson 2002 and Scarpa 2005)• Monolingual general dictionaries• Bilingual general dictionaries

• Monolingual specialized dictionaries • Bilingual specialized dictionaries• Encyclopaedias and encyclopaedic dictionaries

• Personal knowledge and intuition• Glossaries (already existing on line, on paper, built

“ad hoc”)• Terminological databanks • Comparable documents in another language both in

paper and in electronic form (on-line and off-line corpora)

• Field experts

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How DO YOU distinguish SPECIALIZED TERMS, or expressions, from WORDS? How do LEXICOGRAPHERS/TERMINOLOGISTS

identify TERMS?

• are they more difficult to understand?

• are they used more frequently?

• are they concise and economical?

• are they ‘transparent’ and

systematic?

• are they semantically precise and

‘monoreferential’?

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TERMS AND SPECIALIZED COLLOCATIONS AND FORMULAE

Terms are “ words (single or compounds) that are used in a specialized domain and have a clearly defined meaning “ (Bowker and Pearson 2002: 145) e.g. gene /biotechnology

A specialized collocation involves the co-occurrence of two or more lexical items with a specialized meaning, e.g. gene flow

A specialized formula is a pre-fabricated expression recurrent in a specialized domain, e.g. “I declare that to the best of my knowledge and belief…”

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How best to build a record sheetfor a term/specialised expression?

DEFINE THEM IN TERMS OF:

domain, sub-domain, definition, translation equivalents, spelling variants, synonyms, grammatical information, pronunciation, recurrent collocations, related terms, usage notes

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UNIT 3 European and World Institutions: Europe Some facts about the European Union.

The EU

- has 27 state members

- has 23 official languages

- has translation and interpreting services

- has English and French as main working languages

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A research on the European Commission Press Releases in English

• Is there a variety of English called Euro-English?

see. Linda Barone, (2005), La Lingua inglese delle istituzioni Europee, Salerno: La Veglia editore.

• See the European Union on line http://europa.eu

• http://iate.europa.eu/iatediff/

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Some specific features of EU press releases in English

• Lexical productivity, e.g. harmonization or harmonisation

• Loans from other languages, e.g.third countries, inter alia)

• Acronyms, e.g. Eurostat = European Statistical Office

• Metonyms, e.g. The Bologna Process• Metaphors e.g. Europe’s founding fathers• Impersonal constructions versus

personalizations• Premodification and nominal style

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UNIT 4 English for Tourism

• “English for Tourism” is a relatively new area of study. It includes different genres:

1. highly technical anf globalized text types, e.g. booking forms and business letters;

2.leaflets and brochures more affected by cultural assumptions and expectations, e.g. in specialised magazines or on web sites;

3. Tourist guidebooks

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Tourist guidebooks: a hybrid genre

Tourist guidebooks:

• ARE ADDRESSED TO DIFFERENT TARGETS ( e.g . NATIONALITY, AGE, EDUCATION, INCOME, SPECIFIC INTERESTS…)

• Are multimodal (e.g. include verbal language, pictures, interactive links…)

• include expository parts (e.g. to describe places and to provide historical information), instructions (e.g. advice on eating and entertainments) and, often, evaluation / promotion;

• can be consulted in different ways, e.g from cover to cover, or to find answers to specific questions; before, during or after the visit;

• can cover different areas (e.g. a whole country or a city, specific activities and interests e.g. hiking or gardens)

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Modern tourist guidebooks

• have developed from previous genres which reflect changes in travelling habits (from pilgrimages to thermal holidays, from the “Grand Tour” to mass tourism, from sustainable tourism to package holidays);

• have become establishd as a genre since the I9th century;

• follow different traditions in different countries, e.g. the Italian Touring Club Italiano(1895), the British Murray (1836), the German Baedeker(1828), the French Michelin (1900);

• range from ‘traditional’ ( e.g. Guide Bleu) to ‘new’ guidebooks (e.g. Lonely Planet, Rough Guides, Le Routard)

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Interesting types of research on tourist guidebooks

• Diachronic, e.g. to compare guidebooks written in different times ;

• Intercultual, e.g. to compare an Australian guidebook and a German guidebook to the same place in terms of contents and style;

• Cultural adaptation: e.g. to compare the source text (e.g. in English) and its translation (e.g. in Italian);

• Study of specific guidebooks (e.g Lonely Planet or The Rough Guides)

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UNIT 5 “Scientific and Technical English”

• Many different labels: English for Science and Technology (EST), Academic English, English for Academic Purposes, Medical English, Netspeak, Electronic English…

• Two examples from the fields of medicine and computing

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Some historical/cultural reasons for the present predominance of English in Science

and Technology (see Gotti 153-188)

• In Britain: in the 17th century the birth of the experimental scientific method (F. Bacon), of the experimental essay (R. Boyle) and the founding of “The Royal Society” in London (1660); starting from the 18th century the development of the Industrial Revolution;

• In the US: in the 20th century the American leadership in scientific and technological research during and after the Second World War, and the invention of the computer

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CONFLICTING IDEOLOGIES ON THE ROLE OF ENGLISH AS THE GLOBAL LANGUAGE OF

SCIENCE AND TECHNOLOGY• THE FUNDAMENTAL VALUE OF MULTILINGUALISM

= ALLOWS DIFFERENT CULTURAL AND HUMAN PERSPECTIVES ON THE WORLD, BUT MAY RENDER COMMUNICATION DIFFICULT

versus• THE FUNDAMENTAL VALUE OF A GLOBAL

LANGUAGE = ALLOWS UNPRECEDENTED POSSIBILITIES FOR INTERNATIONAL CO-OPERATION, BUT MAY STILL THE VOICE OF SCIENCE IN LANGUAGES OTHER THAN ENGLISH

CAN THE TWO VIEWS BE RECONCILED?

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Analysis of the two texts about avian influenza (or bird flu)

Consider Text 1 and Text 2 and analyse their similarities and differences in terms of :

• GENRE = a fairly stable form of communication - with specific conventions - which is adopted and recognised by a scientific/professional community;

• FIELD = the topic, e.g. the use of concepts and terms to express them and the link between concepts, see Halliday’s experiential metafunction;

• TENOR = who speaks or writes to whom, e.g formal or informal register, use of modality and evalutative expressions, writer-reader visibility, see Halliday’s interpersonal metafunction;

• MODE = the medium chosen, the structure and order of information, Halliday’s textual metafunction,

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TEXT ANALYSIS

TEXT 1Genre: the abstract of an article

published in an American scientific journal (Chest), and also available on the web;

Field (or topic): Avian influenza, terminology of classical origin ( e.g. influenza, pathogenic, immunogenicity); long nominal groups (e.g. “more than 200…transmission…)

Tenor ( or register): experts to expertsMode ( or medium): written, compact

text , no paragraphs, genre conventions, e.g key words;

TEXT 2• Genre; the first page of a fact

sheet published by the Center for Disease, Control and Prevention (CDC) of the Department of Health and Human Services, US,(HHS), available on the web;

• Field : Avian influenza; use of less specialized terms, eg. bird flu; repetition of key-words (e.g. secretions and excretions); definitions, explanations, clarifications and examples are often provided;

• Tenor: experts to medical doctors and/or educated readers

• Mode: divided into titled sections, written in paragraphs

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The text of an online software manual (WordSmith Tools)

LOCALIZATION (localizzazione): in general the process of linguistic and cultural translation and adaptation of a text to ‘local’ expectations and needs; more specifically the translation of a computer manual or web site according to specific contexts, technical requirements and /or pre-existing guidelines set by producers;

“Localization Industry Standard Association (LISA)”: a private nonprofit organisation promoting and discussing localization issues. See www.lisa.org

For localizzazione see references in Scarpa’s book. For the lexis of computer science, see Gotti pp. 267-279)

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Stylistic Analysis of the English version of the initial page of WordSmith Tools online manual by Mike Scott, OUP, 1996

• What stylistic features strike you in the English version?

- Consider the writer’s attitude to the reader, and the register of the text;

- Consider the syntactic choices (sentence structure, mood, thematic choices…)

- Consider the use of lexis(e.g.words and terms, word-formation processes)

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WORDSMITH TOOLS MANUAL : some stylistic features

• From expert to expert-to-be• Adoption of a friendly and personal

tone (e.g. use of “you” and “I”, use of contracted verb forms, use of non-technical words along with specialized terms e.g. “General stuff / anyway” versus “4MB of RAM”)

• Use of American spelling ( e.g. disk, program)

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DIFFERENCES BETWEEN TRANSLATION 1 AND 2 of “Wordsmith Tools” handbook

• What major differences do you notice between translation 1 and translation 2 at the levels of:

- tenor (or register) - lexical and terminological choices - syntactic choices - omissions/additionIn conclusion, which translation do you

prefer, and why?

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SIMILARITIES AND DIFFERENCES BETWEEN TRANSLATION 1 AND 2

• TRANSLATION 1

1. Adoption of a more formal tone ( General stuff= Informazioni generali)

2 Similar textual organization (with some graphic differences)

3 Adoption of a neutral / impersonal tone ( e,g. “Per eseguire Wordsmith Tools occorrono…. “Verrà suggerita la posizione…”

4. Preference for terms in English ( e.g. directory)

TRANSLATION 2

1. The same

2 The same

2. Retention of a more personal tone (e.g “Per avviare Wordsmith Tools avete bisogno di…” “ Io suggerisco…”

3. Preference for terms in Italian ( e.g. cartella and use of italics for somee English terms)

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Useful terminological data banks and definitions

The European Commission Database

http://europa.eu/iate/Controller

Several glossaries through search engines, e.g Webopedia Computer Dictionary ( in English)

http://www.webopedia.com/

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UNIT 6 ACADEMIC DISCOURSE

UNIVERSITY STUDENTS’ GENRES

• Oral (lesson, seminar, workshop, lecture, exam, conference…) vs. written genres ( test, written exam, term paper, final essay, seminar report)

• Tesina, tesi, tesi di dottorato e.g. discutere la tesi versus• Graduation thesis / dissertation (Am.E.) / graduation thesis/BA, MA or

PhD thesis/dissertation (Am.E.) e.g. to defend a thesis

ACADEMIC GENRES • abstract• dedication• acknowledgments• academic paper: research article, experimental article, essay, review

article, survey article)• monograph