Changing conventions in English-German translations of popular scientific texts

Kranich, Svenja; House, Juliane; Becher, Viktor

doi:10.1075/hsm.13.21kra

In:Multilingual Individuals and Multilingual Societies
Edited by Kurt Braunmüller and Christoph Gabriel
[Hamburg Studies on Multilingualism 13] 2012
► pp. 315–334

Get fulltext from our e-platform

Download Book PDF

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

Published online: 22 August 2012

https://doi.org/10.1075/hsm.13.21kra

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.

Cited by (21)

Cited by 21 other publications

Order by:

Redelinghuys, Karien

2024. Language contact and change through translation in Afrikaans and South African English. In Constraints on Language Variation and Change in Complex Multilingual Contact Settings [Contact Language Library, 60], ► pp. 58 ff.

Vo, Lien-Huong & Thuy-Minh B. Nguyen

2024. Using Corpora in Translation Studies and Translation Education. In Innovations in Technologies for Language Teaching and Learning [Studies in Computational Intelligence, 1159], ► pp. 219 ff.

İŞİ, Nazan & Korkut İŞİSAĞ

2022. Implications of English as a Lingua Franca for Translation and Interpreting: Current and Future Directions. Çeviribilim ve Uygulamaları Dergisi 2022:32 ► pp. 121 ff.

Pang, Shuangzi & Kefei Wang

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

Scarpa, Federica

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

Scarpa, Federica

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

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.

Dai, Guangrong

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

Dai, Guangrong

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

House, Juliane

2014. Translation Quality Assessment: Past and Present. In Translation: A Multidisciplinary Approach, ► pp. 241 ff.

House, Juliane

2014. Introduction. In Translation: A Multidisciplinary Approach, ► pp. 1 ff.

House, Juliane

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

House, Juliane

2018. Translation studies and pragmatics. 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

Kranich, Svenja

2014. Translations as a Locus of Language Contact. In Translation: A Multidisciplinary Approach, ► pp. 96 ff.

Kühl, Karoline & Kurt Braunmüller

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

Zanettin, Federico

2014. Corpora in Translation. In Translation: A Multidisciplinary Approach, ► pp. 178 ff.

[no author supplied]

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

This list is based on CrossRef data as of 11 december 2025. 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.