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This contribution addresses the question of whether and how translation as a classic case of language contact can act as a trigger for convergence and divergence phenomena between two languages. We present two studies which indicate that translation-induced convergence does not occur unconditionally: while we found no signs of English-German convergence in the use of modal verbs (study 1), the use of sentence-initial concessive conjunctions in translated and comparable German texts shows convergence with Anglophone usage patterns (study 2). Explaining these disparate results, we hypothesize that divergence occurs when bilinguals perceive profound differences between source and target language (as is the case in English and German lexicogrammatical means for expressing modality), while convergence takes place when bilinguals perceive items as equivalent in form and function (as is the case in English and German concessive conjunctions).

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This contribution summarizes results of the project Covert Translation, where we investigated the influence of Anglophone communicative conventions on German via translation. Our hypothesis was that the prestige of English as a lingua franca and the growing number of translations from English into German leads to a decline in "cultural filtering", i.e. a diminishing tendency of translators to adapt conventional Anglophone norms to German norms. In this way, English-German translations may introduce linguistic variation to certain target language registers, with Anglophone usage norms also spreading to nontranslated German texts. We will here review a number of project studies using a corpus consisting of (1.) English popular scientific texts, (2.) their translations into German, and (3.) comparable non-translated German texts. These studies show that English-German translations are characterized by a considerable degree of source language 'shining-through' , which has, however, only in one case led to Anglophone communicative norms spreading to non-translated German texts. We conclude that, for the popular science genre, translationinduced influence of English on German is a marginal phenomenon.