The Bottleneck Hypothesis argues that properties of inflectional morphology explain why second-language learners may face persistent difficulties in articulating meaning in target-language forms. In particular, the acquisition task proves even harder when first and second languages differ in the way they organize the mapping of functional features…

Back translation--the 're-translation' of a translated questionnaire back into the original language and the subsequent comparison of the original version and the back translation--is a controversial assessment method for questionnaire translations. Recently, cross-cultural survey methodologists have followed the call for more empirical research…

In this paper plurilingual and autonomy building activities are described with reference to the CercleS European Language Portfolio and some parts of the original Council of Europe Language Portfolio. For this extracurricular plurilingual learning project in Portugal, eight second-year female students studying for a degree in Executive Secretarial…

Online translation (OT) sites such as Free Translation and Babel Fish are freely available to the general public and purport to convert inputted text, from single words to entire paragraphs, instantly from one language to another. Discussion in the literature about OT for second-language (L2) acquisition has generally focused either on the…

Advances the hypothesis that, when translating French personal constructions involving an adjective and a verb infinitive into English, the property of the English adjective determines whether the verb will be translated as an infinitive or as a gerund. Alternatives for handling such translations in machine translation systems are explored. (five…

Proposes a linguistic model based on the theory that linguistics is the science of translation, and shows that universal problems of translation are in reality linguistic problems. (AM)

Describes the inroads made into Canadian French by English phonology, vocabulary, and syntax, and argues for a "refrancisation" which will preserve the unique flavor of Canadian French. (AM)

Techniques are outlined for translating the French imperfect subjunctive into English without syntactic awkwardness, based on the approach that the verb form is a logical system regulated by well-defined syntactic rules. (MSE)

Papers, all in French, presented at a conference on linguistics include: "Machine Translation: Historic Aspects" (Ghada Attieh); "Translation and Conditioning" (Stephanie Bedard); "Semantic or Pre-Semantic Structures? From Perception to Causation" (Denise Belanger); "Presentation of Poetry Sung in Maroc"…

Examines the differences in the way French and English treat contrastive stress and comparatives, with implications for translation. (AM)

Reviews the grammatical, semantic, and stylistic difficulties in translating English passive constructions into French. (AM)

Discusses problems of terminology in modern-day French-English translation, and means by which translator skills can keep up with linguistic evolution. (Text is in French.) (AM)

Paper presented at the Second International Conference on Linguistics and Translation, October 4-7, 1972, Montreal, Canada. (DD)

Describes a study that attempts to systematize the criteria required for accurate translations of technical documents. The results of a Linguistic Appreciation Questionnaire-Test, administered to 19 professional translators, were used to categorize the most common translation variables: style, structure, rhythm, and meaning of text in the hope of…

Discusses the translator's need for help from structural linguistics and the inadequacy of the response of linguistics to so-called translation problems. Two German-French syntax problems are given as examples and a solution is offered from a translator's point of view. (AMH)