Nicole Baumgarten

English as Lingua Franca in covert translation processes

Abstract The project described in this paper deals with the role played by global English in initiating language change via language contact in translation and multilingual text production. The paper presents the theoretical background, the analytical procedure, the corpus and first results of this project, which is currently carried out within the Sonderforschungsbereich ‘Mehrsprachigkeit’ (Research Centre on Multilingualism) funded by the Deutsche Forschungsgemeinschaft (German Science Foundation). The working hypothesis underlying this project is that the increasing dominance of the English language as a global lingua franca impacts on translations from English into other major European languages and on parallel text production. In order to test this hypothesis, a multilingual corpus of translation and parallel texts in three genres was compiled and, as a first step, subjected to in-depth qualitative analysis and comparison on the basis of a systemic-functional evaluation model. The purpose of these analyses is to find out whether linguistic and cultural specificity in target text communicative conventions tends to give way to typical Anglophone conventions. Following an outline of the model of analysis and the corpus, major results of the analyses of English source texts and their German translations are presented and discussed.