As a side effect of the rapid progress in medical research and of the emergence of new medical conditions, medicine is a domain where new concepts have to be named more frequently than in many other domains. Because of the prominent position of English in medical research, most of these concepts are first named in English. This raises questions relating to the naming strategies adopted and the consequences of the choice of particular strategies. These consequences are not restricted to English, because the English terms often need to be translated and are sometimes borrowed. This volume consists of an introduction and eight chapters. The first four chapters focus on the choice of naming strategy and the consequences for the transparency of the resulting names in English. These chapters address the international pharmaceutical nomenclature, the terminology of psychiatry and of middle-ear surgery, and the use of neoclassical word formation. The following four chapters concentrate on the issues of translation and borrowing evolving from the choice of names in English. They address translation into Spanish, Slovak, Polish and Turkish.

This controversial new book addresses the linguistic problems around compounds: words which sit on the borderline of syntax and morphology.

A state-of-the-art survey of complex words, this volume brings together a team of leading international morphologists to demonstrate the wealth and breadth of the study of word-formation. Encompassing methodological, empirical and theoretical approaches, each chapter presents the results of cutting-edge research into linguistic complexity, including lexico-semantic aspects of complex words, the structure of complex words, and corpus-based case studies. Drawing on examples from a wide range of languages, it covers both general aspects of word-formation, and aspects specific to particular languages, such as English, French, Greek, Basque, Spanish, German and Slovak. Theoretical considerations are supported by a number of in-depth case studies focusing on the role of affixes, as well as word-formation processes such as compounding, affixation and conversion. Attention is also devoted to typological issues in word-formation. The book will be an invaluable resource for academic researchers and graduate students interested in morphology, linguistic typology and corpus linguistics.

Fills a gap in cross-linguistic research by being the first systematic survey of the word-formation of the world's languages. Data from fifty-five world languages reveals associations between word-formation processes in genetically and geographically distinct languages.

Both compounds and multi-word expressions are complex lexical units, made up of at least two constituents. The most basic difference is that the former are morphological objects and the latter result from syntactic processes. However, the exact demarcation between compounds and multi-word expressions differs greatly from language to language and is often a matter of debate in and across languages. Similarly debated is whether and how these two different kinds of units complement or compete with each other. The volume presents an overview of compounds and multi-word expressions in a variety of European languages. Central questions that are discussed for each language concern the formal distinction between compounds and multi-word expressions, their formation and their status in lexicon and grammar. The volume contains chapters on German, English, Dutch, French, Italian, Spanish, Greek, Russian, Polish, Finnish, and Hungarian as well as a contrastive overview with a focus on German. It brings together insights from word-formation theory, phraseology and theory of grammar and aims to contribute to the understanding of the lexicon, both from a language-specific and cross-linguistic perspective.

The correct interpretation of Multiword Units (MWUs) is crucial to many applications in Natural Language Processing but is a challenging and complex task. In recent years, the computational treatment of MWUs has received considerable attention but there is much more to be done before we can claim that NLP and Machine Translation (MT) systems process MWUs successfully. This volume provides a general overview of the field with particular reference to Machine Translation and Translation Technology and focuses on languages such as English, Basque, French, Romanian, German, Dutch and Croatian, among others. The chapters of the volume illustrate a variety of topics that address this challenge, such as the use of rule-based approaches, compound splitting techniques, MWU identification methodologies in multilingual applications, and MWU alignment issues.

A New York Times Notable Book for 2011 One of The Economist's 2011 Books of the Year People speak different languages, and always have. The Ancient Greeks took no notice of anything unless it was said in Greek; the Romans made everyone speak Latin; and in India, people learned their neighbors' languages—as did many ordinary Europeans in times past (Christopher Columbus knew Italian, Portuguese, and Castilian Spanish as well as the classical languages). But today, we all use translation to cope with the diversity of languages. Without translation there would be no world news, not much of a reading list in any subject at college, no repair manuals for cars or planes; we wouldn't even be able to put together flat-pack furniture. Is That a Fish in Your Ear? ranges across the whole of human experience, from foreign films to philosophy, to show why translation is at the heart of what we do and who we are. Among many other things, David Bellos asks: What's the difference between translating unprepared natural speech and translating Madame Bovary? How do you translate a joke? What's the difference between a native tongue and a learned one? Can you translate between any pair of languages, or only between some? What really goes on when world leaders speak at the UN? Can machines ever replace human translators, and if not, why? But the biggest question Bellos asks is this: How do we ever really know that we've understood what anybody else says—in our own language or in another? Surprising, witty, and written with great joie de vivre, this book is all about how we comprehend other people and shows us how, ultimately, translation is another name for the human condition.