Patterns of intralingual translation in "Matura" reading tasks
Patterns of intralingual translation in "Matura" reading tasks

A case of English for Specific Purposes?

Author(s): Romuald Gozdawa-Gołębiowski
Subject(s): Theoretical Linguistics, Applied Linguistics, Philology
Published by: Wydawnictwa Uniwersytetu Warszawskiego
Keywords: matura; reading; washback; endonormativity; intralingual translation
Summary/Abstract: The paper examines the features of English used in the Polish "Matura" reading tasks, with a view to establishing patterns of correspondence between the original texts and the modified versions used for examination purposes. It is claimed that the differences between the two text categories are non-random and predictable, reminiscent of the effects of an intralingual translation. For reasons of space, only three areas of textual adaptations, referred to as “3Cs,” have been investigated here: culture, co-text (including paragraph organization, linking words, anaphora, etc.) and content (lexis, morpho-syntax, phraseology). An in-depth study of "English for Matura Purposes", a notion qualitatively different from English as a Foreign Language, is an important educational challenge, as high-stakes foreign language exams are argued in this paper to exhibit a degree of endonormativity (in the sense of providing norms of correctness to be observed by local users).

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