The paper presents ongoing research in contrastive corpus linguistics with envisaged applications in machine translation (MT) and with focus on Google Translate (GT) performance in English-Bulgarian translation. Structural patterns, forms or expressions where automatic translation fails are identified and analysed in view of creating a GT-editing tool providing improved target language output. The paper presents the corpus and the corpus analysis method applied, including the identification of inacceptable string types, their structural analysis and categorization. For each failure type, pre- or post-GT editing transformations are proposed. A first outline is proposed of a GT-editing tool consisting of a pre-GT editor performing string identification, substitution or deletion operations, a post-GT editor with a set of more complex string transformation rules and an additional module transferring structural information.

The article reports research on the concept of key words as statistically significant items in a text or corpus. It reviews approaches to eliciting key words used in various software products for language analysis and the rationale for adopting them. Based on empirical data, a new method is proposed and tested on an exploratory corpus. The motivation and arguments for proposing the procedure are revealed, using comparisons between different languages. The adequacy of the results yielded by the different methods is tested via a mechanism developed with this research.

The article discusses the current state of sign language interpreting in Bulgaria. It analyzes a range of historical, social and professional issues regarding policymaking, sign language education and methodology. Presented here are three interrelated factors influencing the interpreting practice in the country such as limited knowledge about the linguistic status of Bulgarian Sign Language, traditions in Bulgarian deaf education and social attitude of the hearing majority regarding the linguistic skills of deaf and hard-of-hearing people.

The following paper discusses some of the motifs ubiquitous to Tennessee Williams’ oeuvre, namely truth and illusion as they are presented in one of his most famous plays, A Streetcar Named Desire. The author endeavors to portray these motifs through an analysis of the characters' behavior and the subsequent, tragic consequences in order to reveal the humanness of Williams' characters who are just like the playwright himself, all marred by alcoholism, depression and loneliness.

This paper is a critique of the book “Lewis Carroll in Russia: Translations of Alice in Wonderland 1879–1989” by Fan Parker, Ph.D., which reviews eleven Russian versions of the children’s classic. Detailed analysis of Dr. Parker’s book has led the author to conclude that most of its principal arguments and findings are unsubstantiated, mistaken, biased or inexpert, and that it cannot possibly be seen as a source of authority in literary translation studies.

This article comparatively examines French and English literature based on two novels published in 1947, Malcolm Lowry’s Under the Volcano and Jean-Louis Curtis’ The Forests of Night. Both novels employ the mythic device to construct narratives on the twilight of the British Empire and the German occupied French Vichy regime, respectively, depicting experiences of resistance and collaboration on the eve of and during the Second World War. Both invent a system of symbolic imagery modelled on the Surrealist template in Jean Cocteau’s The Infernal Machine, that turns the classical mythic device still prevalent in the early 20th century (i.e. in Joyce or Eliot) upside down. The revolution in Mythic Imagination follows the Structuralist Revolution initiated by Durkheim, Saussure and Bachelard, evacuating fixed ontological architecture to portray relational interdependency without essence. These novels pursue overlapping ethical investigations, on “non-interventionism” in Lowry and “fraternity” in Curtis. The novels raise questions about the relation between colonialism and fascism and the impact of non-Western mythic universes (i.e. Hinduism) upon the Mythic Imagination. They have implications for our understanding of gender relations, as well as the value of political activism and progress.

Cross-language plagiarism is increasingly being accorded the interest of academics, but it is still an underresearched area. Rather than displaying linguistic similarity or identity of lexemes, phrases or grammatical structures within one language, translated plagiarism is viewed as the theft of ideas involving two languages. Two instances of translated plagiarism will be discussed - lifting a text from language A, translating it in language B to reuse it as one’s own text, and back-translation: lifting a text verbatim from language A, translating into language B and then re-translating back into language A. The emphasis will be on non-standard structures and inappropriate linguistic choices violating source language norms which could go some way towards assisting in the detection of translated plagiarism, a task heretofore not resolved either by linguists or by computer specialists. The topic is of seminal importance to non-English speaking academic contexts.

The article deals with some internal theoretical controversies in the concept and the use of the term inversion in English syntax as used in some descriptive and most pedagogical grammars of Modern English. The analysis focuses mainly on the formation of interrogative and emphatic negative structures in English by applying some basic concepts of generative grammar. The aim of the analysis is to explain the transposition of the subject and the verbal predicate by following the Occam Razor' s principle of scientific description requiring the employment of a minimal number of principles and technicalities in the course of analysis which results in higher explanatory adequacy. This aim is achieved through the application of the terms operator and operator fronting in the cases of both obligatory and reversive inversion. The obligatory visualization of the operator in a series of syntactic structures is also discussed and a general rule is formulated.

In standard British/American English, some transitive verbs, which are ontologically specified for objects, may be used with the objects not overtly expressed (for example, leave), while other transitive verbs do not permit this syntactic behavior (for example, vacate). The former have been referred to as verbs that allow implicit arguments. This study shows that while verbs such as vacate do not ideally allow implicit arguments in standard British/American English, this is permitted in Ugandan English (a non-native variety), thereby highlighting structural asymmetries between British/American English and Ugandan English, owing mainly to substrate influence and analogization. The current study highlights those structural asymmetries and ultimately uncovers some characteristic features in the structural nativization process of English in Uganda, thereby contributing to the growing larger discourse meant to fill the gaps that had characterized World Englishes scholarship, where thorough delineations of Ugandan English have been virtually absent.

This paper presents a study of the system of lexical devices used by English speakers to verbalize their personal memory experiences. The approach presented in the paper presupposes inclusion of non-narrative structures into the spectrum of language forms conveying mnemonic meanings and extends the latter so as to encompass the meanings of encoding, storage, retrieval and loss. The research is based on the hypothesis that lexical units expressing memory-related meanings in English constitute a specifically organized system. A variety of communicative contexts representing mnemonic situations are analyzed as to develop a typology of memory verbalizers in English, estimate their functional potential and role in objectifying personal memory experiences on the lexical level. The results confirm the original hypothesis and suggest that mnemonic lexicon as a linguistic reflection of the mnemonic faculty is an important and largely understudied element of the language – memory system.