German Texts Research Articles

“Vergis Mein Nit”—Connectedness and Commemoration through Rings in the 16th Century

By the end of the 16th century, finger rings in reverse glass painting technique became increasingly popular in Europe. Often, they are used in the context of signet rings with the monogram together with the coat of arms of its beholder depicted on the glass bezel. The following paper concentrates on nine finger rings of this group. Instead of an actual coat of arms though, these finger rings carry the device V(G)MN or FGMN (for-get-me-not) accompanied by a depiction of little blue forget-me-not flowers as the coat of arms. By collecting and describing the so far existing material, the paper aims to contextualize the use and function of the finger rings with the symbol of the forget-me-not flower in the fields of love, friendship and faith. Furthermore, it links the symbol of the for-get-me-not on finger rings and the imperative power of the written letters V(G)MN or FGMN to its tradition in German literature and texts.

Annotated dataset creation through large language models for non-english medical NLP

Obtaining text datasets with semantic annotations is an effortful process, yet crucial for supervised training in natural language processing (NLP). In general, developing and applying new NLP pipelines in domain-specific contexts for tasks often requires custom-designed datasets to address NLP tasks in a supervised machine learning fashion. When operating in non-English languages for medical data processing, this exposes several minor and major, interconnected problems such as the lack of task-matching datasets as well as task-specific pre-trained models. In our work, we suggest to leverage pre-trained large language models for training data acquisition in order to retrieve sufficiently large datasets for training smaller and more efficient models for use-case-specific tasks. To demonstrate the effectiveness of your approach, we create a custom dataset that we use to train a medical NER model for German texts, GPTNERMED, yet our method remains language-independent in principle. Our obtained dataset as well as our pre-trained models are publicly available at https://github.com/frankkramer-lab/GPTNERMED.

Framing Science in the Media: Case Study of News on Bolshaya Udina Volcano

The article considers the process of transformation of framing of science from a researcher (6 letters, 5 versions of the text with corrections) through the news in corporate mass media (press release, 1 text) to other mass media (8 texts in English, 1 text in German, 59 texts in Russian). Three frames were identified in the original text: “narrative of the progress of the study”, “catastrophizing the results of the study”, and “the need for additional observations for more accurate research results”. The media exploited the “catastrophizing” frame most actively: 6 texts in English, 1 text in German, 42 texts in Russian. Also, journalists implemented one more frame – “verification of results by external experts” (1 time in English and 1 time in Russian). In the texts in Russian has appeared another source of information – a press-release by the Institute of Volcanology and Seismology, which can be singled out in a separate frame “refutation of the results obtained by external experts” (15 texts). There has been a convergence of the format of news and a press release about scientific results since journalists used texts prepared by press services without verification and external comments. As a result, the frames of the original text are duplicated in mass media. If the frame is based on sensation, the emphasis on sensation increases in further replication when information about the research (its methodology, problems, and development) decreases.

Comprehensibility in translation of medical texts

Medicine is a field that is being closely followed as a scientific field worldwide and in which there are continuous developments. Because it is a science that covers the necessary applications to prevent and treat diseases, as well as to protect and improve health. This field of science, whose history is as old as the history of humanity, has its own terminology, which comes from Greek and Latin. Therefore, the (difficult) comprehensibility of the medical language is one of the issues emphasized. Medical professionals know this terminology well and understand it easily. Lay people, however, may have difficulty understanding medical language. The (difficulty) level of language used in medical texts varies according to the target audience. If the target audience of the text is professionals, a language dominated by sophisticated medical terminology of Greek and Latin origin is used. The reason for this is that medical terminology facilitates communication, as it is a shared language worldwide. However, if the target audience of the text is lay people, people tend to use easier-to-understand language and more common medical terms and known to the public. This is because the text should be accurate and easy to understand. This should also be the aim of translations of medical texts. This present study analyzed the Turkish translations of German texts published on the website of an official institution and produced to inform the public about infectious diseases. Informative texts about 32 different diseases on the website were analyzed, and eight texts were selected as different examples of ‘comprehensibility in translation’. The study focused on medical terms and expressions that are unclear, misunderstood, or cause ambiguity in translation texts and investigated the causes of the clarity problem. As a result of the study, it was observed that the literal translation approach in the translation of medical texts in which equivalent equivalents (i.e. national medical terms) in their own language replace medical terminology since the target audience is lay people, leads to the emergence of 'comprehensibility' problems.

BÜCHNER, BORDERS AND THE CONVERGING OF ‘CROWDS’: JACK THORNE'S WOYZECK (2017)

ABSTRACTAs an important site of cross‐cultural exchange, theatre translations performed in Britain form key routes for international writers to be introduced to, and to influence, British audiences and theatre‐makers. This article introduces Jack Thorne's 2017 adaptation of Woyzeck by Georg Büchner, performed at the Old Vic Theatre in London, as a case study to trace how British theatre practitioners and institutions frame and utilise German texts and playwrights to construct an image of German (theatrical) culture in Britain. I will focus on institutional practice in the first instance, tracing how the Old Vic Theatre framed this production as appealing to two different ‘crowds’ and how Woyzeck relates to the Old Vic's stated institutional aims. This will be combined with performance and textual analysis that draws out the ways in which the production thematises borders and cultural difference. While theatre in translation can be seen as a bridge between different national cultures, I ultimately argue that this Woyzeck adaptation highlights, and indeed propagates, divisions between British and German (theatrical) cultures.

THE SEA IN POETIC LANGUAGE OF THE ANCIENT GERMANS (TESTIMONY OF THE TEXTS)

The article is devoted to the consideration of language means, used for expressing of the sea element image in ancient Germanic texts. For a number of words naming the sea, secondary nature of «marine» semantics is established relative to a whole series of primary meanings ʻwaveʼ, ʻsurfʼ, ʻwater billowʼ, ʻmovement (of water mass)ʼ etc. The contexts collected in the study illustrate the semantic differences in word usage, enabling one to more or less exactly state when it is about a wave, the movement of a water surface, and when it is actually about the sea. It is further suggested a description of the structure and semantics of the sum of composites, often used to denote the marine world. It follows from the description that the «marine» vocabulary of ancient Germanic poetic texts was an open system (it could be replenished with new composites), which developed by analogy with itself, having as samples the composites inherited from the Proto-Germanic language. Special attention is paid to the set of epithets of the sea in the accessible corpus of German texts and descriptive expressions, in which the sea is likened to a person, and this fact indicates the ancient metaphorical perception of the world from the standpoint of anthropocentrism

The eradication of hate speech on social media: a systematic review

PurposeThe purpose of this paper is to present a quantitative and qualitative synthesis of the diverse academic proposals and initiatives for preventing and eliminating hate speech on the internet.Design/methodology/approachThe foundation for this study is a systematic review of papers devoted to the analysis of hate speech. It has been conducted using the Preferred Reporting Items for Systematic reviews and Meta-Analyses (PRISMA) protocol and applied to an initial corpus of 436 academic texts. Having implemented the suitability, screening and inclusion criteria, this corpus was refined to a sample of 74 articles.FindingsThe main subject categories studied in this corpus of academic research are legal issues and social media. In the majority of the articles, the use of hate speech via social media is associated with five typologies: religion, cyber racism, political slurs, misogyny and attacks on the LGTBI community. The absence of ethical reflection is one of the major shortcomings of IT-focused research and analysis devoted to online hate speech.Practical implicationsTo date various systematic reviews have been presented, and they focus on detecting or describing hate speech. These have used either the search appraisal synthesis analysis framework or the Cochrane network. The PRISMA protocol was applied for this study, and both Scopus and texts in German were included. To date no major, rigorous systematic review has been undertaken of proposals to combat hate speech.Originality/valueThe link between hate speech and poverty has not been studied in depth within the academic sphere. Tolerance and ethical compassion are not granted the attention they merit when it comes to analysing the phenomenon of hate speech.

SINTAGME S FUNKCIONALNIM GLAGOLIMA KAO IZAZOV U PREVOĐENJU PRAVNIH TEKSTOVA S NJEMAČKOGA NA HRVATSKI JEZIK

The subject of research in this paper are constructions with function verbs in the German language of the legal profession (Funktionsverbgefüge – FVG) as a linguistic phenomenon that is culturally conditioned. The authors strive to prove that these structures represent a chal- lenge in understanding and translating legal texts from German into Croatian. As a complex structure whose verbal part has lost its original meaning, this construction often leads to mis- understanding and wrong translation of legal texts, which can lead to unwanted legal effects. This is well illustrated by the claim of our widely known legal translator Susan Šarčević: “Legal translation (...) leads to legal effects and may induce peace or prompt war.” The goal of this research is to shed light on the problems in understanding and translating such structures, to indicate to what extent the same structures are represented as their translation equivalents in the Croatian language, and which translation versions appear in Croatian as more stylistically acceptable solutions. The research corpus consists of examples of structures with functional verbs excerpted from the German Constitution (Grundgesetz) available on the website of the German Federal Ministry of Justice and their translation equivalents in the official transla- tion of that law in the Croatian language by Nina Sokol. The results of the research will widen knowledge in the field of legal language translation, and their practical value is in elucidating the difficulties in understanding legal texts in German that Croatian scientists and students in the field of law encounter in their research and scientific work, as well as court interpreters and translators who deal with legal texts in their professional work.

PECULIARITIES OF TRANSLATING DOUBLETS INTO UKRAINIAN (BASED ON GERMAN AND ENGLISH LEGAL TEXTS)

The article discusses the challenges and strategies of translating doublets into Ukrainian based on German and English legal texts. A corpus-based approach is used to analyze legal texts in two languages to identify the most common types of doublets and determine the most effective ways to translate them into Ukrainian. The study shows that translating doublets in legal texts is a complex process that requires a deep understanding of the source and target languages, as well as the context in which the doublets are used. The results of the study demonstrate that there are several strategies that translators can use to translate doublets effectively. For example, using synonyms, paraphrasing, and omitting one of the components of a doublet pair. These strategies proved to be especially useful when translating doublets from the legal field, as translation in this field requires accuracy and clarity. The practical results of this study are important for translators working with legal texts in German, English and Ukrainian. The study provides valuable insights into the most effective strategies for translating doublets and emphasizes the importance of a thorough understanding of the context in which doublets are used. Moreover, the article has important theoretical importance for researchers in the fields of translation studies, terminology, general and comparative linguistics. The study of doublets on the example of legal texts helps to better understand the mechanisms of translation and the peculiarities of language. The results of the research can be used in further studies of the translation process, including the analysis of other language phenomena and contexts. In particular, it has been found that translating doublets is a complex process that requires a translator to have a deep knowledge of both languages and clear understanding of the context in which doublets are used. In general, the study shows that translation of doublets is an important part of the translation process and requires the translator to be able to follow effective strategies and identify ways to translate doublets.

Semantic temporality analysis: A computational approach to time in English and German texts

Temporality is an important aspect of political discourse. Politicians and policymakers attempt to construct the past and the future to gain power, legitimize their policies, claim success for themselves and blame others. To make computational analysis of temporality more accessible, we develop a new methodology using a semisupervised machine-learning algorithm called Latent Semantic Scaling. Only with a set of common verbs in the past perfect and future tense as seed words, the algorithm estimates the temporality of all other words. We demonstrate that it can identify temporal orientation of English and German sentences from election manifestos around 60–70% accurately, which is comparable to the results from a recent study based on supervised machine-learning algorithms. We also apply it to Twitter posts by German political parties to reveal temporal orientation of policy issues.

Domestic – Foreign – Intercultural: Pragmatics of Translation (On the Material of the Texts Devoted to S. Diaghilev’s Artworks)

The article deals with the linguistic representation of the linguoculturological triad "domestic – foreign – intercultural" as part of the theory of reflective and translation turns developed by D. Bachmann-Medick. Globalization has transformed the principle of binary categorization and mapped out the possibility of their synthesis and formation of a third space of communication. The purpose of the study is to analyze and describe translation strategies and techniques used for the transfer of intercultural meanings that create a third space in the perception of the global recipientt, where neither basic, nor adaptive culture markers are preserved. The empirical basis of the study is represented with the original and translated texts of international artistic festivals, memoirs of Russian and foreign artists, as well as the verbal content of news online platforms dedicated to the 150 th birth anniversary of S.P. Diaghilev. As a result of the analysis, three key strategies for the translation of linguistic-and-cultural units have been identified: domestication, foreignization and intercultural mediation. They are interchangeably used in the process of translating the Russian texts under consideration. However, owing to the communicative task of original texts – to convey the specifics of Russian culture and include national art in the world cultural fund, the strategy of intercultural mediation is the most frequently used one. This strategy is implemented through the use of Gallicisms in translated English and German texts, international vocabulary, and elimination of national and cultural specifics. It has been shown that a translator's individual style is imposed on the systemic and cultural specifics of natural languages.

USAGE OF ANTHROPONYMS IN MODERN GERMAN AND UKRAINIAN MEDIA DISCOURSES

The article is dedicated to establishing the peculiarities of using anthroponyms in modern German and Ukrainian political media discourses. The study materials were modern online media news from Germany and Ukraine during January-March 2023. Onyms in general and anthroponyms in particular occupy a central place in reference in the information flow. Proper names are undoubtedly an essential component of media discourse, as any complete message presupposes the presence of referents that are identified through anthroponyms, toponyms, or other types of onyms. When referring to anthroponyms in German and Ukrainian media practices, a similar set of collocations with anthroponyms can be observed: from maximal identification of the referent with attributive expressions to the use of traditional contextual synonyms. Nevertheless, certain features of reference to onyms in the analyzed political media texts can be observed. In German media linguistic culture, the use of elaborate anthroponyms is typical, where party affiliation, age, and other information can be indicated, which is obviously due to the desire for comprehensive identification of the actors. In Ukrainian media practice, there is a tendency towards shorter identification of anthroponyms In modern German and Ukrainian media texts, we observe the following principle of using anthroponyms: the headline provides minimal identification for actors, the opening provides maximum identification of the anthroponym, and in the text itself, reference to the anthroponym is made through the surname or other reference markers.

Using Negations in Analyzing German Texts in Finance

Using Negations in Analyzing German Texts in Finance

Die Baumstruktur des Tractatus: Genesis, Lesarten, Editionen

Abstract Tree-Structured Readings of the Tractatus : I argue that the numbering system of the Tractatus lets us see how it was constructed, in two closely related senses of that term. First, it tells us a great deal about the genesis of the book, for the numbering system was used to assemble and rearrange a series of drafts, as recorded in MS 104. Second, it helps us understand the structure of the published book, as cryptically summarized in the opening footnote. I also discuss an unpublished letter from Anscombe to von Wright from 1948 which contains the very first sketch of a tree-structured reading, and what I believe is Stenius’s response to Anscombe’s proposal. The paper critically evaluates previous work on tree-structured readings and contends that we need to read the Tractatus in both the number order used in the published book and the tree order that Wittgenstein used to draft it. It also considers some of the main ways of turning this complex branching structure into a linear, printed text, and so serves as an introduction to the three tree-structured editions of the Tractatus that accompany the original English-language publication of this paper in NWR 11 (the German text, and the translations by Ogden & Ramsey and Pears & McGuinness).

The morphologization of German noun-participle combinations. A diachronic case study

The present paper focuses on the recent history of German noun-participle combinations in which the noun saturates an argument of the base verb. These structures are hybrids between phrases and words, yielding variation in spelling and in the form of the nominal constituent. For instance, the combinations Mitleid erregend vs. mitleidØerregend vs. mitleidserregend ‘pitiful’, lit. “pity-arousing” (where Ø represents a zero morpheme) exemplify such variation, which is a (preliminary) result of (ongoing) language change. Therefore, this paper studies how the noun-participle pattern has diachronically evolved between syntax and word formation since the 18th century. Spelling and nominal forms are used as central indicators. For the latter, two approaches based on verb-valency are introduced. Data from the German Text Archive and DWDS core corpus show that over the past 300 years, noun-participle combinations have undergone a process of morphologization: they are increasingly written as a graphemic unit and take nominal forms that are typical of nominal root compounds. Moreover, this study shows that morphologization is partly supported by high token frequencies of individual types. It is argued that the phenomenon is best characterized by assuming a gradient distinction between syntax and word formation.

Multilingual Text Summarization for German Texts Using Transformer Models

The tremendous increase in documents available on the Web has turned finding the relevant pieces of information into a challenging, tedious, and time-consuming activity. Text summarization is an important natural language processing (NLP) task used to reduce the reading requirements of text. Automatic text summarization is an NLP task that consists of creating a shorter version of a text document which is coherent and maintains the most relevant information of the original text. In recent years, automatic text summarization has received significant attention, as it can be applied to a wide range of applications such as the extraction of highlights from scientific papers or the generation of summaries of news articles. In this research project, we are focused mainly on abstractive text summarization that extracts the most important contents from a text in a rephrased form. The main purpose of this project is to summarize texts in German. Unfortunately, most pretrained models are only available for English. We therefore focused on the German BERT multilingual model and the BART monolingual model for English, with a consideration of translation possibilities. As the source of the experiment setup, took the German Wikipedia article dataset and compared how well the multilingual model performed for German text summarization when compared to using machine-translated text summaries from monolingual English language models. We used the ROUGE-1 metric to analyze the quality of the text summarization.

Eine neue Text- und Aufgabensammlung zur deutschen Sprachgeschichte in statu nascendi. Eine Projektskizze

The topic of this paper is the role of German language history in the context of university-based German studies abroad (so called “Auslandsgermanistik”) with focus on German studies in the Czech Republic and selected didactic aspects. Above all, the paper aims to present a project of a new collection of texts and tasks on German language history, which is currently being developed at the Department of Germanic Studies (Faculty of Arts, Charles University). The paper comments on the specific features of the book, including a focus on German texts from the Czech Lands and interdisciplinary orientation, among others. The appendix contains excerpts from the forthcoming publication.

„Ételîh fúncho dero uuârhéite. lóskêt târínne. dér fóne dero ánablâsentûn lêro erchícchet uuírt“. Zur Diachronie in Lehrplänen der Prager deutschen und tschechischen Germanistik nach der Teilung der Prager Universität 1882

After 1882, the development of the University of Prague and its division reflected the situation of Czech and German society in the Czech Lands. While German Studies at the German university of Prague since 1882, when the University of Prague was divided into two autonomous – German and Czech – institutions, continued its pedagogical and scientific activities, it was necessary to establish German studies at the Czech university of Prague. Despite the progressive specialization of German Studies in German language and literature and the following internal differentiation of German Studies into older and newer German language and literature at the turn of the 19th and 20th centuries, great attention was traditionally paid to the older German language and literature in the curriculum of German Studies. The teaching here focused mainly on the analysis and interpretation of Gothic, Old and Middle High German texts from a linguistic and literary point of view. After 1900, the content of diachronic courses changed for German Germanists in favor of prehistory, dialectology and onomastics, and for Czech Germanists it was directed towards German-Czech language contacts, especially in the lexicon. These changes in the teaching profile and scholarly area were related not only to the development of German Studies, but also to social changes, especially in the 1930s and 1940s.

Development and verification of a user-friendly software for German text simplification focused on patients with cerebral palsy

People with disabilities, especially those who have been diagnosed with cerebral palsy or other neurological diseases, are often not able to understand the text they are confronted with in their daily life. Important information, for example from the government, is manually translated by professionals into easy language suitable for these people, however, this method cannot be scaled-up to a large number of documents.We have developed a software that translates German text into a simpler version. The software, based on the easy language rules, shortens the text and replaces difficult words with synonyms. To maintain a correct grammar during the synonym replacement, the software recognizes the phrase containing the replaced word and conjugates the other words in this phrase, if needed. For the verification of the software developed, the grammatical correctness of the replacement was quantified by German native speakers and the text shortening was compared against the results of 12 healthy volunteer readers.The software provides an easy-to-use interface, which takes into account both the mental and physical difficulties of the impaired people. Therefore, one can assume that the software will be a helpful tool for the acquirement of text content for these people.

Historical postmortem studies on catatonia: Close reading and analysis of Kahlbaum's cases and scientific texts between 1800 and 1900

In the 19th century, postmortem brain examination played a central role in the search for the neurobiological origin of psychiatric and neurological disorders. During that time, psychiatrists, neurologists, and neuropathologists examined autopsied brains from catatonic patients and postulated that catatonia is an organic brain disease. In line with this development, human postmortem studies of the 19th century became increasingly important in the conception of catatonia and might be seen as precursors of modern neuroscience. In this report, we closely examined autopsy reports of eleven catatonia patients of Karl Ludwig Kahlbaum. Further, we performed a close reading and analysis of previously (systematically) identified historical German and English texts between 1800 and 1900 for autopsy reports of catatonia patients. Two main findings emerged: (i) Kahlbaum's most important finding in catatonia patients was the opacity of the arachnoid; (ii) historical human postmortem studies of catatonia patients postulated a number of neuroanatomical abnormalities such as cerebral enlargement or atrophy, anemia, inflammation, suppuration, serous effusion, or dropsy as well as alterations of brain blood vessels such as rupture, distension or ossification in the pathogenesis of catatonia. However, the exact localization has often been missing or inaccurate, probably due to the lack of standardized subdivision/nomenclature of the respective brain areas. Nevertheless, Kahlbaum's 11 autopsy reports and the identified neuropathological studies between 1800 and 1900 made important discoveries, which still have the potential to inform and bolster modern neuroscientific research in catatonia.