Lingua e traduzione inglese: ESP - English for specific purposes and specisalised translation

Esp english for specific purposes

ESP is a field of teaching the English language which focuses on developing communicative skills in specific disciplines such as EAP (English for academic purposes), EOP (English for occupational purposes), EBP (English for business purposes), EPP (English for professional purposes such as doctors, lawyers, etc.). ESP differs from English for general purposes mainly because learners are generally adults who already have knowledge of the language and they study the language in order to communicate a set of professional skills as well as to perform specific occupation-related functions. It aims more on language in context than grammar and language structures.

Characteristics of ESP

ESP is characterised by six factors:

• Limited subject matter
• Lexical, syntactic and semantic restrictions
• "Deviant" rules of grammar
• High frequency of certain constructions
• Text structure
• Use of special symbols

Its main lexical features are:

• Monoreferentiality not used to indicate that each term has only one referent but to signal that in a given context, only one meaning is allowed
• Lack of emotions because emotions are not involved. For example, the term "love" in a specific context means "tie" (pareggio) in tennis matches
• Conciseness so the expression of concepts in as few words as possible
• Transparency which is useful for the quick decoding of the meaning such as gastroenterology because we understand the meaning of this word only if we have studied medicine or Greek and Latin; this word can be separated into gaster, enteron, and logos

Syntactic features

There are 3 syntactic features:

• Nominalisation: the use of a word which is not a noun such as a verb or an adjective as a noun, in English when nominalisation occurs, grammatical words are not necessary (incoming emails, updated error correction code)
• Sentence simplification
• Passive constructions

Textual features

While the 2 textual features are:

• Which-cohesion: the linguistic items which compose the text (lexical cohesion, anaphora, cataphora, substitution, ellipsis)
• Which-coherence: depends on the speaker's knowledge of the world. It is not intrinsic to the text.

Specialised translation

Its aim is to develop competences in specific language fields involving business, legal English, multimedia language, tourism, and advertising. What we need to do is to focus on 3 main elements: 3 linguistic areas that have to be taken into account when we translate specialised texts:

• Textuality: concerns the whole, it refers to the text as a discourse
• Morpho-syntactic structure: regards the specific choices of syntax in the text. For example: passive structures, nominalizations, verbalizations, use of imperative, and so on; it implies the way you use language
• Lexico-semantic features: type of language and register to use according to the context (formal, informal, etc.); what terms are selected from the lexical container?

Linguistic studies on specialised languages

Linguists who studied the use of specialised languages starting from 1973 include:

• Beccaria and Dardano: spoke about "linguaggi settoriali" which embrace both the language for advertisement, politics, newspapers and the language for science, information, and technology.
• Cortellazzo: spoke about a "special language".