The present study investigates the stereotypical cultural and linguistic manifestations of Englishness in Michael Bond’s book for children entitled A Bear Called Paddington as source text and its Hungarian retranslation by Miklós Gábor Kövesdi Paddington megérkezik ‘Paddington arrives’ as target text. The paper draws on insights from translation studies and imagology, especially focusing on the verbal cues employed in the two texts, considered as a parallel corpus consisting of eight stories in each volume. Due to the fact that the specific target audience of the texts are children, both the writer’s and the translator’s aim is to educate and to amuse. Through a close microanalysis of the source text, the recurrent representations of Englishness are first identified (e.g. culture-specific vocabulary, different levels of formality, indirectness, forms of politeness, understatement, and humour). Then, as a second step, these elements are traced in the Hungarian retranslation, trying to answer the question whether the image of stereotypical Englishness is perpetuated or domesticated in the translation.

The article provides an insight into an ongoing terminological planning process within the Hungarian Terminology Strategy sub-programme of the Hungarian Academy of Sciences, which aims to develop an eight-language digital database of educational terminology. It presents the theoretical and methodological foundations of the database construction, with particular emphasis on the concept-oriented approach and the identification of equivalence levels. The first part analyses the characteristics of Hungarian educational terminology in Slovakia followed by a terminological comparison of the Slovak system of teacher career development and its Hungarian equivalents. Based on legislative sources, the study identifies the relevant conceptual features and proposes Hungarian equivalents suitable for integration into the professional register used by Hungarian speakers in Slovakia.

The role of educational drama and the successful implementation of drama techniques in teaching foreign languages have been confirmed by various research findings. There is a growing need for English as a foreign language (EFL) teachers to find appropriate tools to improve the teaching and learning of EFL to satisfy learners with special educational needs (SEN). The paper focuses on the link between the incorporation of drama techniques and teaching learners with SEN in the higher level of primary school with close attention to special needs connected with cognition and learning (e.g. dyslexia, dysgraphia, etc.) and needs connected with social, emotional, and mental health (e.g. ADD, ADHD, etc.). The paper presents the findings of document analysis and semi-structured interviews with in-service EFL teachers at the higher level of primary schools with Hungarian language of instruction in Slovakia. The major aim of the interviews was to investigate EFL teachers’ attitudes and self-efficacy in implementing inclusive practices, their attitudes and experiences concerning teaching learners with SEN and using drama techniques. A secondary aim was to examine the current situation in schools and the support EFL teachers receive in their institution. Based on the findings, implications for management strategies, teacher education, and teacher training courses or trainings are discussed.

There has been a remarkable interest in language anxiety (LA) over the last four decades. Particularly foreign language anxiety (FLA) is currently the most widely studied emotion in second language acquisition (SLA) (Gkonou et al. 2017). Anxiety frequently appears in the case of oral tasks; perhaps this is the reason why most researchers tend to focus on the verbal cues of LA and neglect the nonverbal signs. Some claim that 65% to 93% of communication is done nonverbally (Knapp and Hall 2002), and thus it is essential to consider and study these cues in a language anxiety research. The present paper presents nonverbal cues observed during a simultaneous interpreting task from Hungarian to English. Participants (N = 12) were Hungarian-mother-tongue students studying translation and interpreting in BA and MA courses. Silence, pauses, and other body language cues will be observed and analysed based on their recorded interpreting performance, and the results of the follow-up interviews will be presented to support the findings. These findings raise awareness of the importance of acknowledging nonverbal cues of LA in the case of interpreting students.

In this paper, we examine the relationship between language proficiency and metalinguistic awareness among Hungarian secondary school students in Harghita County, Romania, using empirical data from a fact-finding study conducted in the school year 2023–2024. After outlining the theoretical framework and describing the research methodology, the study presents findings based on a sample of 1,520 participants. As both languages under investigation have been learned/acquired after the mother tongue, the paper first reports the results of the English and Romanian proficiency tests, followed by an analysis of the factors that participants identified as influencing their performance. Finally, the study explores how students perceive the role of metalinguistic awareness and metalinguistic knowledge in their language learning outcomes. By comparing the acquisition processes of the two languages, the research demonstrates that the mode of learning plays a decisive role in shaping the function of metalinguistic awareness.

The need to integrate machine translation post-editing (MTPE) in translator training reflects the increasing presence of advanced technologies in the translation industry. This study examines the role and significance of MTPE instruction in modern translator training, emphasizing its contribution to improving translation efficiency, quality, and consistency. It was observed that translation students in our programme frequently utilize machine translation tools, such as Google Translate, DeepL, or ChatGPT, often without fully understanding their limitations. We assume that incorporating more language-pair-specific MTPE practice into the curriculum could enhance students’ translation performance. To investigate this, we evaluated the ability of graduate translation students at Sapientia Hungarian University of Transylvania to translate texts from English into Hungarian using MTPE. The study involved analysing translations of two texts translated by 18 students to identify common errors, including issues related to grammar and syntax, meaning inaccuracies, omissions or additions, and overly literal translations. Furthermore, a post-task interview was conducted to gain deeper insights into our students’ strategies and perceived challenges. Based on these findings, we aim to update the curriculum by incorporating targeted theoretical and practical components related to MTPE.

In Hungary, classroom observation is an integral part of teacher training programmes. As part of their teacher education, students have always been required to visit and observe classes taught by experienced in-service teachers. The system of teacher training has undergone several changes in the past decades, now enabling teacher trainees to observe classes as early as the fourth semester of their studies. While this certainly has a lot of advantages, it raises the question of what trainees can really observe at this early stage, without extensive training on EFL teaching. Thus, this is the main research question of the current study. In this research, teacher trainees from a Hungarian university (N = 42) were asked to report on their observations of English classes. The thematic content analysis of the teacher trainees’ observation reports shows a detailed account of student and teacher language and behaviour as well as of the teaching environment and material. An additional factor that appears is the trainees’ self-reflection in the form of recalling their past learner experiences and reflecting on their future teacher selves.

This study explores the acquisition and processing of Differential Object Marking (DOM) in Modern Hebrew by L1 Romanian, L2 Hebrew learners at the A1 and A2 proficiency levels. Modern Hebrew marks the direct object with the preposition et and features a unidimensional DOM system that is primarily sensitive to definiteness. In contrast, Romanian marks the direct object using the preposition pe (accompanied by a clitic doubling) and employs a two-dimensional system influenced by both animacy and specificity. The paper examines, at a small scale through our own research, how beginner learners interpret and apply DOM rules in Modern Hebrew, as they are required to shift from a two-dimensional DOM system in Romanian to a unidimensional one in Modern Hebrew. Findings reveal clear evidence of language transfer, particularly among A1 learners, whose responses often mirror patterns from their first language. However, as learners progress to A2 level and gain greater exposure to the target language, the frequency of errors decreases, indicating a gradual internalization of the relevant structures in Modern Hebrew.

Higher education should serve as a transmitter of knowledge and values while promoting cultural pluralism that goes beyond the normative values and cultural standard of the majority culture. The research of the linguistic landscape of educationscapes (Krompák et al. 2022) highlights the symbolic significance of these environments. Drawing on the idea that educationscapes transmit multicultural and multilingual values, this study offers a comparative analysis of the linguistic landscape of three higher education institutions in Romania with study programmes in Hungarian: the University of Medicine in Târgu-Mureș, Babeș–Bolyai University in Cluj-Napoca, and Sapientia Hungarian University of Transylvania. It examines the transmission of multicultural and multilingual values through the linguistic landscapes of these universities and how institutional signage reflects or contradicts official commitments to linguistic diversity. Drawing on the Multilingual Inequality in Public Spaces (MIPS) model, the study integrates three data sources: policy documents, photographic documentation of signage (n ≈ 250–300 per site), and semi-structured interviews with Hungarian minority students. Findings reveal a discrepancy between institutional language policies and actual linguistic visibility. Romanian predominates in top-down signage, even in officially multicultural universities, while Hungarian is often marginal or absent. English signage may supersede Hungarian, reflecting internationalization priorities. Student interviews underscore the symbolic importance of signage in shaping perceptions of inclusion, recognition, and identity, while demonstrating a critical awareness of linguistic hierarchies.

Social media platforms have become an essential part of today’s communication. They provide people with a space for easier communication and information sharing. However, even if they foster connection and represent an easier way of maintaining relationships, they also present challenges, particularly for people who suffer from some kind of disorder, like eating disorders. X (formerly known as Twitter) is a social media platform that allows people to share personal experiences and struggles in real time. The aim of the study is to examine, by using discourse analysis, a series of extracts highlighting people’s emotional conflicts with eating disorders, in this case, anorexia. The data for this study were extracted by Twitter’s API through Tweepy and manually over the past year and analysed using the MAXQDA computer-assisted qualitative data analysis software. The paper focuses on the analysis of lexical choices, metaphors, symbolism, and narrative structures, which contribute to a more detailed understanding of lexical features used by tweeters to express their feelings and emotions related to anorexia. Moreover, it also offers a framework for recognizing the linguistic features that can help family members, medical professionals, and others to better understand and help those in need.