Malgorzata Godlewska – författare

COVID-19 had an enormous impact on society around the globe. By 5th March 2023, when the WHO officially declared the pandemic emergency over, societies affected by it had been profoundly changed. The COVID-19 pandemic not only had medical consequences, but also significant effects related to the mechanisms involved in its discursive construction as a phenomenon of wide significance in various social arenas. Reaching a highly polarized form, public debate on compulsory vaccination against COVID-19 constituted an essential component of mechanisms not only for stance-taking, for creating opportunities for self- and other-positioning, and for covering discursive positions, but also for subverting existing epistemic orders. The present volume reconstructs this complex discursive phenomenon with examples from Italy, Germany and the USA, and invites critical reflections on the way societies around the globe have faced the extreme crisis sparked by the pandemic.

The eight contributions, written in English and German, address different research problems. The studies in the field of translation concern the problems of translating texts containing newly created Covid vocabulary, the role of semantic redundancy and multilingualism in the audiovisual translation of Woody Allen’s films and the analysis of three Polish translation variants of the short novel ‘The Old Man and the Sea’. The contributions on translation didactics include the awareness of redundancy and its function in the language system, text segmentation as a prerequisite for the translation process, the use of CAT as a component of translational competence, the role of schematic graphics, which can sensitise students to the conceptual differences between languages, and the possible applications of a translation project in foreign language teaching. The considerations in the area of pedagogical translation relate to the possibilities and efficiency of the translational project, which can be used as a didactic tool in foreign language teaching.