Lettres

Abstract This paper presents the research project “The Psycholinguistics of a Grammar for Reading German”, which is being carried out at the Universities of Bern and Freiburg/Fribourg. In the first part of the paper we will briefly describe our understanding of the comprehension ...

The typology of motion and posture verbs: A variationist account Raphael Berthele Abstract According to work by Talmy, Slobin and others, satellite-framed (S)-languages tend to express the path of motion in a verb particle and the manner of motion in the verb (jump, run, etc.), whereas ...

This paper focuses on the most important problem translators are faced with when translating Mark Twain's Huckleberry Finn into German: how can the speech of the African-American character Jim be rendered? When translating Jim's passages substantial problems arise because there is no exact German equivalent of AAVE. This paper examines both orthographic and other linguistic strategies to differentiate Jim's voice over the last hundred years. This historical analysis shows that in most translations before the 1960s, these strategies downgrade Jim's linguistic and cognitive faculties, depicting his speech as a grammatically simplified pidgin. More contemporary translations, however, opt for devices that depict Jim in colloquial and spoken language that does not carry the same amount of sociolinguistic stigma. Thus, changing translation techniques shed light on prevailing attitudes toward non-standard varieties of both German and English.