Review 2: On Selected Aspects of Languages for Special Purposes by Elena Nikolajová – Kupferschmidtová, Pavol Štubňa and Alexandra Kučmová – Lenzi

Reviewed by Mária Koscelníková

The ability to speak foreign languages connects us with the people we otherwise could not be able to communicate with. There are specific situations like legal communication or politics when we need to rely on translation or interpreting, the accuracy of which is crucial. Translators and interpreters often face special circumstances or purposes that put them into difficult position. The responsibility to transfer accurate information forces them to face certain aspects of language that require careful attention in order to transfer them. The authors of this monograph understand the necessity to talk about these aspects and discuss the difficult task the translators and interpreters have. The authors decided to focus on two different professional sectors — legislation and politics, and two different rendering modalities — translation and interpreting.

The first part of the monograph is dedicated to European legal language and translation and consists of two chapters. The first chapter of the monograph discusses the hybridity of EU legal texts/documents being translated into Slovak. The authors depict the process of creation of EU legal documents and its impact on translation. Since the European Union groups 28 different cultures, authors from different cultures participate in the creation of the documents and there is high probability of implementing national or cultural elements into the EU legal documents as well as their translations. The authors discuss the phenomenon of EU legal language or so-called Eurospeak that introduces new meanings of various terms established in the respective cultures that originated due to the involvement of drafters, lawyers-linguists and translators being from different cultures causing the hybridity of the text.

On the example of Danube Region strategy documents and water legislation, the authors pointed out different translations of same terms occurring during the process called consensus building as a result of drafting documents on multinational level. Since the documents elaborated in the EU shall comply with four levels – national, regional, European and international, translators have to take this into consideration during their decision-making process as well as the function of the text.
In the second chapter, the authors add intercultural aspect of hybrid texts. Eurospeak created by lawyers-linguists provides unambiguous versions of rather ambiguous terms on national level. The authors highlight supranationality that must be implemented during translations in order to avoid misinterpretation and ambiguity. The authors bring the notion of national language being adapted to the EU context. Hybrid legal texts are the result of translation as intercultural communication. The authors discuss the choices of translator conditioned by national as well as EU legal system. Translator has to achieve hard task and the drafters have to bear in mind the understandability by all European citizens.
The second part of the monograph consists of three chapters and introduces the language of politics and interpretation. The authors introduce the specifics of political speeches and political discourse, while discussing important and less important aspects the interpreter considers during the interpretation. On the example of the speeches of Italian political representatives, the authors firstly discuss extralinguistic and linguistic aspects of delivery regarding Italian environment that the interpreters must consider. The authors mention specific lexis of Italian deliveries as well as the history and current state of Italian political language. On the example of Italian political representatives, the authors discuss leadership strategies implemented in the delivery of leading Italian politicians and challenges of such deliveries that the interpreters have to overcome. The authors conclude with the importance of knowing background information about the speakers that enable the interpreter to provide more comfortable interpretation.
The penultimate chapter of this monograph presents a case study in translation equivalence when interpreting from Italian into Slovak. The students of 4th and 5th grade of the Comenius University in Bratislava, Slovakia in the field of translation and interpreting with the working languages Slovak, English and Italian were systematically trained to interpret discourses with journalistic style resulting in the model conference. The authors introduce speeches used during the preparatory stage of the model conference and monitor frequent problems occurring when interpreting from Italian to Slovak. The results support the importance of using simulated conferences as a didactic method in order to automatize used strategies. Regarding the Italian language, the author also points out the importance of Italian rhetoric that also must be considered.
In the last chapter, the authors categorize interpretation difficulties and errors based on the analysis of results of the model conference in the previous chapter. The specified issues and errors shall help the future interpreters to avoid the most frequent linguistic, metalinguistic, extralinguistic or pragmalinguistic errors and to influence the quality of their interpretation.
The authors of the monograph thoroughly mapped each discussed issue and the monograph is a valuable contribution into the academic environment.