Translation and interpreting studies curricula typically include courses on the culture and civilization of the languages being studied. At Sapientia Hungarian University of Transylvania, first-year translation and interpretation students take a British Culture and Civilization course that covers a range of topics. As part of this course, students have the possibility to engage in an unconventional activity – a visit to the Teleki–Bolyai Library in Târgu-Mureș. This historic library houses an extensive collection of books in multiple languages from around the world. A lesser-known section contains works by English authors, acquired by the library’s founder, Count Sámuel Teleki. This study aims to explore these authors and books, analysing the insights they provide into British culture and civilization within their historical, humanistic, political, and social contexts. We will examine the themes and fields represented in these works, such as religion, science, and secular literature. Our goal is to highlight how the library’s collection serves as both an inspiration and a valuable resource for students interested in researching or deepening their understanding of these subjects.
The aim of this study is to explore the challenges inherent in the translation of archaic literary texts, focusing on the linguistic choices, constraints, and strategies involved in this process. The linguistic analysis is based on the author’s Romanian translation of Szakátsmesterségnek könyvetskéje, a 17th-century Hungarian cookery book published in Transylvania during the early era of printing. This article argues that when the source and target languages and cultures of an archaic text have historically been in contact, the resulting translation can be more accurate, more reflective of its historical context, and ultimately more engaging for contemporary readers. The paper begins with a general overview of this hypothesis, followed by a discussion of the book’s printer and the presumed authorship, providing essential background for the reader. The final section presents the translation strategies adopted by the author, with particular attention to maintaining both the historical accuracy and stylistic flavour of the original text, but also emphasizing the archaic feature of this important artefact of Transylvanian culture.
There has been a remarkable interest in language anxiety (LA) over the last four decades. Particularly foreign language anxiety (FLA) is currently the most widely studied emotion in second language acquisition (SLA) (Gkonou et al. 2017). Anxiety frequently appears in the case of oral tasks; perhaps this is the reason why most researchers tend to focus on the verbal cues of LA and neglect the nonverbal signs. Some claim that 65% to 93% of communication is done nonverbally (Knapp and Hall 2002), and thus it is essential to consider and study these cues in a language anxiety research. The present paper presents nonverbal cues observed during a simultaneous interpreting task from Hungarian to English. Participants (N = 12) were Hungarian-mother-tongue students studying translation and interpreting in BA and MA courses. Silence, pauses, and other body language cues will be observed and analysed based on their recorded interpreting performance, and the results of the follow-up interviews will be presented to support the findings. These findings raise awareness of the importance of acknowledging nonverbal cues of LA in the case of interpreting students.
The present study investigates the stereotypical cultural and linguistic manifestations of Englishness in Michael Bond’s book for children entitled A Bear Called Paddington as source text and its Hungarian retranslation by Miklós Gábor Kövesdi Paddington megérkezik ‘Paddington arrives’ as target text. The paper draws on insights from translation studies and imagology, especially focusing on the verbal cues employed in the two texts, considered as a parallel corpus consisting of eight stories in each volume. Due to the fact that the specific target audience of the texts are children, both the writer’s and the translator’s aim is to educate and to amuse. Through a close microanalysis of the source text, the recurrent representations of Englishness are first identified (e.g. culture-specific vocabulary, different levels of formality, indirectness, forms of politeness, understatement, and humour). Then, as a second step, these elements are traced in the Hungarian retranslation, trying to answer the question whether the image of stereotypical Englishness is perpetuated or domesticated in the translation.
This article fills a gap in narrative research by investigating how graphical communication contributes to developing small stories in Technologically Mediated Communication (TMC) environments like Facebook Messenger (FM). Scholars examining everyday narratives have primarily concentrated on their structure and identity formation, while others have investigated the linguistic features of graphicons in digital environments. Nevertheless, there remains a gap in explicitly connecting these visual elements as essential contributors to the overall construction of narratives and identities. The article explores how visual aspects are integrated into text-based exchanges, influencing the construction of narratives and identity. The research method is discourse analysis and the data are Facebook Messenger exchanges among a group of college students. The findings show that graphicons are critical, co-constructed narrative components that promote an interactive relationship between verbal and visual communication.
