Language variation and change through translation

Moving on from this interest in the late stages of grammatical change, we focused next on the question: what happens in the very last stages – i.e. rather than looking at the much investigated question in diachronic linguistics as to how new grammatical constructions and categories come into being and explaining why they emerge, we wanted to find out more about the comparatively little researched question as to how they decline and eventually die out. In a workhop at the 40th DGfS in Stuttgart in 2018 we brought together renowned scholars from different countries, different research disciplines and interested in different languages (with a strong focus on English and German, however), who looked at different stories of loss in language change.

Translations can serve as an entry point for innovation and variation in language use, and may, under certain conditions, even lead to lasting change in the target language (cf. Kranich 2014). In a cooperation with USTB Beijing we aim to understand this process better, by comparing ways in which translation from English has introduced variation and (small-scale) change into German with ways in which translation from English has influenced modern written Chinese.

Works cited in the project description
Kranich, S. (2014). Translation as a locus of language contact. In J. House (Ed.), Translation: A multidisciplinary approach (pp. 96–115). London: Palgrave Macmillan.