Tomasz P. Krzeszowski Livres

Almost everything that one claims about meaning is likely to be questioned or disputed. Translation studies also abound in numerous controversies. However, there is no doubt that translations entail a transfer of meaning, even if the exact sense of the word „meaning“ remains vague. The same applies to the term „translation equivalence“. This book is an attempt to cope with conceptual, terminological, theoretical, and practical difficulties resulting from this nebula of issues. Numerous examples of translated legal, religious and artistic texts are provided to substantiate the claim that translation equivalence, except in the most trivial sense of the term, is indeed a delusion. The book is addressed to all those persons who are interested in mutual relations between semantics and translation studies.

The volume consists of reprints of papers originally published between 1967 and 2009, divided into two parts, only apparently devoted to two different areas of linguistics but in fact constituting a coherent whole. The «cognitive» part is an inevitable consequence of the «contrastive» part. In the first part such terms as «congruence», «equivalence» and «tertium comparationis», as well as fundamental principles of classical, structural contrastive studies are defined and implemented in actual contrastive analyses. In addition, the first outlines of contrastive generative grammar with its limitations inherent in all generative grammars are presented. The second part capitalizes on this shortcoming and contains articles which lay foundations of cognitively based contrastive studies. It also introduces axiological semantics as being crucially important in analysing metaphors, discourse and metalanguage, as well as in contrastive studies and translation.

Since translation cannot be approached in isolation from meaning, anything that is said about translation must necessarily be placed in the context of meaning. Accordingly, the first volume of the book concerns this necessary context, while the second volume will view translation in terms of the semantic framework presented in the first volume. Both volumes are to a large extent consistent with major tenets of cognitive linguistics. The work is addressed primarily to students pursuing translation studies but also to all those persons who are interested in semantics and translation for whatever other reasons. The main aim of the book is to provide the prospective reader with a quantum of knowledge in the two areas. A subsidiary aim is to tidy up the metalinguistic terminology, replete with such deficiencies as polysemy, whereby one term is laden with a number of senses, as well as synonymy, due to which one sense is connected with more than one term.

Contrastive linguistics has a much longer history than is commonly assumed in the literature on the subject. This monograph is an account of contrastive studies conducted in England and documented in written materials originating between the middle of the fifteenth century and the end of the eighteenth century. These materials show that contrastive studies were conducted systematically, covered a large scope of language data in various languages, and occasioned a number of theoretical and methodological issues, anticipating those that have constituted the mainstream of modern contrastive studies. Among them were negative and positive transfer, with the accompanying efforts to counteract the former and utilize the latter, as well as the notorious difficulties with establishing the necessary tertium comparationis, though not expressly formulated, inevitably hovering in the wings, and occasionally prompting new methodological techniques.