APERÇU DU VOCABULAIRE MARITIME DANS LES LANGUES ROMANES VU DE LA PERSPECTIVE DE L’INTERCOMPREHENSION
OUTLINE OF THE MARITIME VOCABULARY IN THE ROMANIC LANGUAGES SEEN BY THE PERSPECTIVE OF THE INTERCOMPREHENSION

Summary/Abstract: In 2008, within a new project about intercomprehension (IC) – REDINTER – a thematic network, which federated 28 partner institutions and bodies from 13 European countries and 27 associated institutions - we placed our bets on IC as a process that facilitates understanding of languages that have not been learned yet, based on the fact that languages are interconnected in various ways. Upon its successful completion in 2011, there was no doubt about the IC integration into plurilingual education since it favors contact with languages in a relaxed but effective manner, it helps learning how to learn languages and develops competences in understanding languages that have not been previously studied. The results of our research encouraged us to embark on a new project – INTERMAR – whose ambitious goal is to apply the already existing materials and products on IC to the maritime training context in order to provide seafarers with the necessary tools to overcome language barriers and convey their message regardless of their country or language of origin. Consequently, this paper aims to highlight the degree of transparency of several high-frequency words in the basic maritime vocabulary of several Romance languages (RL) from the IC perspective. There are four parts to this paper. The first part includes the Introduction where the author will define the concept of IC and its importance within the Romance languages, followed by the actual description of the experiment conducted at the Naval Academy of Constanta, during which the respective students (2nd year, Romanian native speakers, French background) have been exposed to several newspaper articles in 5 RL (Portuguese, Italian, Spanish, French and finally Romanian - to check against), and then asked to report back on how much information they were able to retrieve from the texts and on IC strategies. The text is a selection of the most relevant information from a Wikipedia entry of approximately 250 words on a relatively recent event (the Costa Concordia 2012 grounding and partial sinking); the other versions have been harmonized. Next, the learners were presented with the most common method of reading a (maritime) text in Romance languages - the Seven Sieves, tributary to the EuroComRom method.The third part contains the interpretation of the results of this experiment, and the final part comprises the author’s conclusions.

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