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RÉSUMÉCet article présente une étude des relations sémantiques entre les informations visuelles et verbales dans le cinéma et montre les différences entre les conventions de référence aux informations visuelles par les moyens verbaux dans les films en anglais et dans leur version en allemand. L'analyse d'un corpus diachronique de films populaires en anglais et de leur version doublée en allemand montre qu'on traite de manière différente la cooccurrence d'une information visuelle avec une information verbale dans les originaux et leur traduction. Dans la traduction allemande, on tend à introduire des structures linguistiques différentes pour renvoyer à une information visuelle. On insère des référen-ces pronominales et d'autres termes déictiques supplémentaires pour lier de manière ostensible un élément linguistique à un élément visuel. Par conséquent, dans la version allemande, le discours verbal est directement lié à son environnement, pendant que, dans les originaux anglais, la relation entre le discours et la scène se manifeste souvent de manière plus implicite sur le plan lexical. Ces différences résultant de la traduction influent sur la signification exprimée sur le plan du texte. Il se peut que -à côté d'autres phénomènes au-delà du texte, comme par exemple les relations de genre -cette variation de la construction narrative du cinéma soit le résultat de la traduction. ABSTRACTThis article presents an account of the meaning relationship between visual and verbal information in film and the differences between the conventions of making verbal reference to visual information in English films and their German-language versions. The analysis of a diachronic corpus of popular motion pictures and their German-dubbed versions indicates that the film translations 'handle' the co-occurring visual information differently than their English source texts. The translations tend to use alternative, nonequivalent, linguistics structures to refer to visual information and insert additional pronominal references and deictic devices, which overtly connect linguistic items to pictorial elements. As a result, the ongoing spoken discourse is explicitly linked with the physical surroundings of the communicative encounter. In contrast, in the English language versions, the relationship between the verbal utterance and the accompanying visual information more often remains lexically implicit. The shifts in translation affect the ideational, interpersonal, and textual meanings expressed in the film texts which, in turn, may result in a variation in the films' narrative construction and the realization of extralinguistic concepts, such as, for example, gender relations.

In this paper, we will try to grasp the elusive and controversial concept of explicitness which has been considered from different perspectives in linguistics and will take a special look at different approaches in translation and interpretation studies. Thereby, the often postulated assumption that explicitness is a universal feature appearing in all kinds and all instances of language mediation will be questioned. We will show that explicitness does not result from the translation or interpreting process per se but that other factors (also) need to be taken into account, especially conventional differences between the languages involved and the different interpreting strategies of the interpreters. Our investigation is based on data from a parallel corpus of German-English popular science texts and a corpus of interpreter-mediated discourse in a conference setting.

The present article investigates writer–reader interaction through the construction of writer and reader personae in English and German popular scientific writing by means of first person plural pronouns in subject position. Popular scientific writing only became firmly established as a German-language genre in the last quarter of the 20th century when the high-profile publication Scientific American entered the German news magazine market with a German-language sister issue, featuring German translations of articles from the English magazine and original text production in German. We assume that language contact in the process of translation from English to German influenced both the German translations and original text production in German and helped to shape genre-specific communicative styles in the then emerging genre of popular scientific writing in German. Writer–reader interaction is considered as one aspect of communicative style. Focusing on the contribution of first person plural pronouns to the realization of writer–reader interaction through specific writer and reader personae, it will be shown that, over time, patterns of use surface in both the translated and non-translated German texts that can – at least in part – be traced back to the English communicative style in popular scientific writing.