translation studies - Facultatea de Litere - Dunarea de Jos

Foreword
categories of HAPPINESS/ FERICIRE and UNHAPPINESS/ NEFERICIRE. (Diana
Ioniţă, Ph.D., works at the University of Bucharest; contact: ionita_diana@yahoo.com)
In Aspects of Translating Passive Constructions in the Law Discourse, Carmen
Maftei considers some problems of passive constructions with frequency of occurrence in
the discourse of law. Leaving aside cases of similarity in the structure and meaning of
passive constructions, the approach considers only some of the difficult situations in which
such constructions occur. The author admits that difficulties brought about by the passive
constructions have been the core of many debates among linguists in many countries of the
world, belonging to different linguistic schools and to various trends, and drawing on this
background, she chooses to focus on the types of passive constructions commonly used in
the law discourse in order to clarify their peculiarities and special uses. (Carmen Maftei,
Ph.D., is a lecturer at the Department of Applied Modern Languages and she teaches
English as a foreign language to non-philological students; contact: c_maftei@yahoo.com)
In a less rigid and stiff manner, the paper Challenges in Teaching English Verbs to
Chinese Students describes Iulian Mardar’s six-year teaching experiments and experience
with learners whose mother tongue lacks a verbal system comparable to the English one.
The author states that teaching a foreign language has always been considered to be an
incredibly challenging task, especially in those situations in which the foreign language to be
taught and the native language of the speaker(s) are significantly different from each other.
The present paper, a glimpse of its author’s experience in Taiwan is intended to illustrate,
on the one hand, essential morphologic differences existing between English and Chinese
verbs, and possible approaches to teaching English verbs to Chinese students, on the other.
For instance, verb categories such as mood, tense, aspect and number, are absent in
Chinese. Consequently, the teaching of English verbs to Chinese students requires that
these notions be previously explained by appealing to the students’ both linguistic and
extra-linguistic knowledge. Moreover, the distinction between notional, auxiliary and
semi-auxiliary verbs is of utmost importance, due to the fact that certain verbs may have a
different status in different contexts (e.g. the verb to be used as a notional verb and as an
auxiliary verb, respectively). Teaching English verbs to elementary Chinese students is
even more challenging. If teenagers and adults have enough experience to understand that
there is a great variety of languages functioning in different ways, 7 year-old children
cannot grasp the complexity of the mechanisms behind a given language system. How
could a Chinese child, familiar with the existence of a unique verb form in her/his native
language, understand that, for instance, the corresponding English verb has three forms
from which other numerous compound tenses may be created? Even though non-native
speakers of a language may understand and accept the existence of significant differences
between languages, the real challenge for the teacher is to help her/his students to get used
to these differences, making them part and parcel of the students’ way of thinking and
speaking in the respective foreign language. (Iulian Mardar is a teacher at a primary school
and a first year master student, specializing in Translation and Interpretation; contact:
iulian19722002@yahoo.com)
Cristina Mălinoiu’s paper, The Concept of Light in Translating Virginia Woolf’s
“A Haunted House” is a (brief) analysis which focuses on different ways of expressing the
concept of light and on translating conceptual metaphors of light in Virginia Woolf’s A
Haunted House. To achieve this end, the author considers that the theoretical preliminaries
call attention to the difficulties of literary translation and presents several aspects of the
cognitive approach to metaphor, seen as relevant for her study. Commenting on the
(un)translatability of the metaphor of light, the author eventually tries to prove how the
process of translation and the understanding of the message encoded in a literary text are in
close connection providing appropriate examples from the Woolfian text. (Cristina
Mălinoiu is a second year master student, specializing in Translation and Interpretation;
contact: malinoiuc@yahoo.com)
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