[Corpora-List] 'Standard European English' ?

[Kate Beeching]

Not to mention "éventuellement" "éventuel" in French = 'possibly, possible'.
 
Some of my MA Translation students have looked at parallel French-English EU texts about topics such as the Erasmus programme. At first I thought the English versions were 'not English' and read as if they were 'French translated'  (lots of nouns ending in -ation!). Finally, however, I decided that this was "Euro-speak" (-babble?") i.e. there is a particular type of English which is used in these contexts. This type of English may be developing at a great rate because often the original documents may be written in English but by non-natives. For example, a Dane wishes to write an EU document so s.he writes it in English.  It is a very interesting topic. At what point do we decide that these documents are not "wrong" but a different/new variety of English and how 'systematic' is this English? (Does it have any rules?),
Kate
 
Dr. Kate Beeching Principal Lecturer, Linguistics and French 
Award Leader, MA in Translation by Distance Learning 
Head, International Corpus Linguistics Research Unit (ICLRU) 
University of the West of England, Bristol 
Faculty of Humanities, Languages and Social Sciences 
Frenchay Campus 
Coldharbour Lane 
Bristol BS16 1QY 
Room: 4C16 
Tel: 0117 32 82385 
E-mail: Kate.Beeching at uwe.ac.uk <mailto:Kate.Beeching at uwe.ac.uk>  
Home e-mail: KBeeching at aol.com 

________________________________

From: owner-corpora at lists.uib.no on behalf of Gloria
Sent: Thu 02/03/2006 1:57 PM
To: Briony Williams
Cc: corpora at lists.uib.no
Subject: Re: [Corpora-List] 'Standard European English' ?



> Somers, Harold wrote:
> > Using "eventual(ly)" to mean "if it happens" rather than "final"
>
> I believe this is from the German "eventuell".

In Italian "eventualmente" means the same, "in case" or something like
that.
"Eventualmente, ti chiamo" = "If xxx (it is necessary, if I feel like
doing it, etc.), I'll call you".

Best,

Gloria




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