Daniela Ionescu

A long-standing source of conceptual difficulty and confusion in interpretation has been the overall construal of the world in the interpreter’s mind when listening to the source language speech. Hence, the target language rendition can be dramatically marked by lack of understanding or by conceptual misrepresentations. The present paper deals with possible landmarks in the follow-up of the target renditions, on the basis of research conducted in the European Master’s Programme for Interpreters’ training in the University of Bucharest. Ultimately, it is not only knowledge of the world and knowledge of the topic that determines appropriate comprehension, it is also knowledge of language grammar that can decisively contribute to a correct, fluent and reliable message in consecutive interpretation.

There is still a lack of a universally applicable and comprehensive scoring system for documenting the invasiveness of surgical procedures. The proposed preliminary 'Universal Surgical Invasiveness Score' (pUSIS) is intended to fill this gap. We used the recently developed pUSIS to obtain values from 8 types of surgery and 80 individual interventions. The results were analysed using descriptive statistical methods. The degree of difficulty on a scale from 0 (very easy) to 10 (extremely difficult) and time expenditures for assessing pUSIS were documented. Individual pUSIS values ranged from 8 in a laparoscopic cholecystectomy case to 36 in a total hip replacement case. The lowest median pUSIS value of 11.5 was found for laparoscopic cholecystectomy and the highest value of 24.5 was found for open thoracic surgery. The correlation between pUSIS values and the duration of surgery resulted in a tight linear regression (R2=0.6419). The lowest mean (±SD) difficulty level to obtain...

This paper will attempt to pinpoint the basic linguistic and cultural characteristics of food idioms in English and Romanian. A cognitive and lexical-syntactic analysis evinces certain structures which can be tested cross-linguistically. Food idioms are analyzed contrastively, in terms of their transparency/opacity gradient, starting from their lexical-semantic composition and syntactic flexibility, i.e. the possibilities of the given phrase to undergo nominal modification, substitution, passivization, aspectuality, negative formation, etc. In conceptual terms, any such pair will also include an ‘image-trigger’, which gives rise to a metaphor or a metonymic reading, therefore – to a figurative, idiomatic interpretation, by projecting the literal to the meta-literal or figurative language. This is the source of conceptual similarity or dissimilarity between the two languages, reflected in the contrasted idiomatic patterns.

The paper attempts to pinpoint the basic linguistic and cultural characteristics of food idioms in English and Romanian. A cognitive and lexical-syntactic analysis evinces certain structures which can be tested cross-linguistically. Food idioms are analysed contrastively, in terms of their transparency/opacity gradient, starting from their lexical-semantic composition and syntactic flexibility, i.e. the possibility of the given phrase to undergo nominal modification, substitution, passivization, aspectuality, negative formation, etc. In conceptual terms, any such pair will also include an 'image-trigger', which gives rise to a metaphor or a metonymic reading, therefore - to a figurative, idiomatic interpretation, by projecting the literal to the meta-literal or figurative language. This is the source of conceptual similarity or dissimilarity between th etwo languages, reflected in the contrasted idiomatic patterns.