Internationale Neerlandistiek - Volume 50, Issue 3, 2012

Dutch is a typical 'third language'. Most learners have knowledge of other languages before they start to learn Dutch. One or two of these languages are closely related to Dutch, English and/or German. When L3-learners come across a new language for the first time, it can be observed that they try to make use of languages they learned before. Experienced language learners often perform better than less experienced subjects. Furthermore, prior research shows that related languages will contribute more to intelligibility than less related languages do.

The objects of this study were 42 German multilinguals reading a Dutch text without knowledge of this language. They mainly differ according to their language background and language learning experience. The results indicate that the experienced learners use more inferring strategies than the less experienced learners and that German is indeed the preferred source of transfer. However, the experienced multilinguals do not show a significantly different metalinguistic strategy pattern, and some regard Scandinavian words as being much more transferable than one might expect. This leads to the assumption that their explicit knowledge about language relatedness and their linguistic knowledge is not fully available in reading comprehension. Finally, the author offers some suggestions as to the direction explanations might take.

French is an important target language in the translation of Dutch literary texts. This article offers a short qualitative and quantitative historical survey of Dutch language literary publications in French translation from 1900 to 2010. Throughout the twentieth century and the first decade of the twenty-first century, the quantity of translations has been increasing. Promotional activities by institutions such as the Nederlands Letterenfonds, formerly the NLPVF, contribute to making a peripheral literature known outside the boundaries of its linguistic area.

The article then goes on to investigate the essential, yet not very well-known, parts that various kinds of mediators play in the translation process, especially in transferring a given text from one national literary field to another. The theory of components as elaborated by Andringa, Levie & Sanders is used to categorise the particularly intricate web of relations between the literary fields of source language and target language in which these mediators, both individuals and institutions, intervene.

As actors behind the scenes, their role is difficult to grasp in reception studies, but they are decisive in their contextualisation, or ‘literarization’ (Casanova 1999), of Dutch literature aimed at a French audience.

Phraseology, the study of all categories of set phrases, has now come to be seen as a major research field within linguistics. It also shows a clear relation„ship with many aspects of corpus linguistics and construction grammar. Some of the most interesting features of phraseology come from a contrastive perspective: the comparison between set phrases in two or more languages. While there is a general agreement that the phraseology of one particular language will be influenced by its culture and traditions, the precise methodology that should be used for contrastive phraseology remains uncertain. In this paper we report the results of an experiment designed to assess whether automated programs, applied to large linguistic corpora, will enable us to extract conclusive evidence for contrastive phraseology. The scope of the experiment is limited to phrases in combination with la mer (French) / de zee (Dutch). The results suggest that the recourse to automated tools is quite useful, while some aspects still have to be dealt with by traditional dictionary search. As far as the case study is concerned, sea phrases in Dutch and French appear to display fewer differences than might have been expected from the historical and cultural background of both languages.

Deze kroniek van het Nederlands als vreemde taal bevindt zich op een hellend vlak, namelijk het vlak dat loopt van Nederlands als tweede taal naar Nederlands als moedertaal ofwel van NT2 naar NT1. Het is een vlak waar taalaanbieders en uitgevers in Nederland zich meer en meer op begeven. ‘We schuiven allemaal’, hoorde ik laatst een uitgever van een NT2-fonds zeggen. En ze bedoelde: in de richting van NT1, Nederlands als moedertaal. Vanwaar dat schuiven en waarom is het een hellend vlak?