Špela Vintar
Journal of Translation Studies. 2008, 11(1): 75-88.
Contacts between cultures are a driving force of technological, scientific and linguistic development, where a culturally or economically more advanced region “feeds” its neighbouring regions. The Austro-Hungarian empire was a multi-cultural environment where this transfer can be observed through — among other processes — translation. This study focuses on the development of Slovene technical and scientific terminology under the influence of German and is based upon a sample from a recently built digital library of translations from German into Slovene from the period 1848-1919, which was created within two nationally-funded projects in Austria and Slovenia.
The period between 1848 and 1919 was particularly crucial for the Slovene linguistic development, and German was at the time an influential language from which many concepts, expressions, phrases and names were borrowed. Apart from the level of the lexicon, significant changes can also be observed on other linguistic levels, from orthography, morphology, phonology, to syntax and pragmatics.
This study analyses several term formation processes such as borrowings, loan translations, term variation, etc.
The corpus-based method allows us to quantify the observed linguistic phenomena and compare some generic traits of texts from various domains, such as the type/token ratio or the ratio of borrowings compared to native vocabulary.
