[New publication] Fachsprache – International Journal of Specialized Communication: volume XXXIX, issue 3-4, 2017

FACHSPRACHE Vol. XXXVIII 3–4/2017

Beobachtungen zur Lokaldeixis in der technischen Fachübersetzung. Ergebnisse einer empirischen Untersuchung an einem viersprachigen Korpus europäischer Patentschriften
Heribert Härtinger
Abstract： The present study explores structures of local deixis in scientific and technical
texts. Its particular focus is on the translational implications arising from the use of local
deixis in European patent specifications, a frequently translated LSP genre with a high
degree of linguistic standardization. The database is a corpus of 40 complete original
(i. e. non-translated) texts covering four of the most important languages in the patent
translation market: English, German, Spanish and Italian. The results show that, in all the
four languages, a considerable semiotic effort is made in patent specifications in order to
minimize patterns of referential ambiguity due to local deixis. In particular, all language
corpora were found to contain a broad variety of genre-specific combinations of verbal
and non-verbal deictic reference serving this goal. The study confirms that these
semiotic features have a positive effect on the translatability of local deixis. In this
context, light is also shed on the benefits gained from using CAT tools for the translation
of local deixis in patent specifications.
Keywords: local deixis, patent specifications, patent translation, ambiguity, multimodality, semiotic analysis, CAT tools

Revising real world tax management speak – a study of reader Response
Anne Kjærgaard
Abstract：  In Denmark, as in many other countries, there are extensive efforts to revise
texts that emanate from public authorities to make them easier to understand and more
appropriate for an audience of lay citizens (a development akin to the campaign for
plain English). Such efforts focus mainly on practice and not on evidence derived from
research. Furthermore, insofar as the effects of revisions of texts from public authorities
and private businesses have been tested by research, the revisions under examination
have been conducted by researchers or at least for research purposes. This study takes a
different approach by focusing on textual revisions made ‘at-source’ by employees at the
Danish Tax Authority and independently of any research project. Taking as its point of
departure the communicative goals laid down by the Authority, the main question
addressed in this article is whether three ‘at-source’ textual versions vary in respect of
their recipients’ levels of comprehension and perceptions. Three different versions of a
letter from the Danish Tax Authority (an unrevised version and two versions that had
been revised in different ways) were distributed at random. Each respondent read one
version and then answered a questionnaire about his/her level of comprehension and
about his/her perceptions of the letter. A total of 714 questionnaires were collected. The
analysis shows that the revised letter versions are, in fact, easier to understand, that the
perceptions of these versions do vary, and that the variations are in accordance with the
communicative goals of the Authority. However, the results also indicate that there is
room for further improvement and they may suggest that the textual revision practices
that are applied – or at least held up as ideal – by Danish authorities are not as effective
as sometimes assumed.
Keywords: plain language, textual comprehension, perceptions of text, textual revisions, public authorities, writing in organizations, effects of textual revisions

Kollokationen in der Fachsprache des Marketings: Entwicklung und Anwendung eines Extraktionsmodells
Guadalupe Ruiz Yepes
Abstract: The aim of this article is to explore collocations in the language of marketing.
The method used relies on the description of scientific papers in the field of marketing
published in specialised journals on the basis of a computer-held text archive or corpus
in three languages (German, English and Spanish). In the first chapters different
definitions for collocations are presented and the methods which have been applied for
the extraction of collocations from corpora up to now are described and analysed. On
this basis a new model for the extraction of collocations from corpora is presented and
applied to the corpus. The results of the extraction of collocation candidates for German,
English and Spanish are compared with each other and final conclusions are drawn. The
results and findings of this piece of research can be applied to improve the performance
in the fields of Translator Training and Second Language Acquisition.
Keywords: collocations, languages for special purposes, marketing, corpus linguistics, phraseology of marketing

Das Konzept des ‚Digitalen‘ in Theologie, Homöopathie, Medizin, Linguistik und Recht. Ein Beitrag zur korpuslinguistischen, kontrastiven Fachsprachen- und -diskursforschung
Friedemann Vogel
Abstract: This paper presents both the approach and first results of an ongoing project
devoted to the computer-based corpus-linguistic analysis of the concept “digital” as
applied in selected domains of specialized communication. Although the role of
‘digitality’ and ‘computers’ in non-professional discourse (in particular in the media) has
been studied in detail, very little is currently known about the related concepts and their
linguistic representation in professional discourse. There has been no empirical
research published yet. The present study is based on a large, digitalized corpus of
scientific articles drawn from theological, linguistic, homeopathic and legal journals that
were processed by computer linguistics. Inductive, semi-automated contrastive and
frame-linguistic corpus analyses were applied to reveal similarities and differences in
the professional communicative conceptualization of the “digital”. This project
contributes to the empirical, cultural and discourse-linguistic research on specialized
professional communication and expands in its scope to the “Digital Humanities”.
Keywords: Digitalitat, Mediensprache, Digital Humanities, Korpuslinguistik, Kulturlinguistik, Computer, Fachsprache, Fachkommunikation, Theologie, Homoopathie, Medizin, Recht