A Journey through Knowledge: Festschrift in Honour of Hortensia Parlog is a collection of articles dedicated to one of the best known Romanian university teachers and linguists, both in her home country and well beyond its borders. The heterogenous material (both in terms of the range of issues tackled and in terms of the approaches adopted by the authors) in the three sections of the volume finds itself a common denominator in the idea of traveling and journey, around which they are organized. In the first section, Traveling across Identities and Emotions, Pia Brinzeu touches upon some identity issues, in dealing with a form of subversion in Coz Shakespeare, by Marin Sorescu; Jaques Ramel argues against the opinion that Shakespeare's A Midsummer's Night Dream was written to be performed as an epithalamium during wedding ceremonies; Adolphe Haberer brings to the fore the non-hero features of the main character in Virginia Woolf's Jacob's Room; Liliane Louvel writes about the mirror in literary texts, insisting on its potential to send back graphic reflections onto these texts; and Maurizio Gotti discusses definitional criteria, i.e., the principles according to which a term should be defined. In section two, Traveling in Time and Space, Slavka Tomascikova speaks about the status, functions and characteristics of media narrative discourse during the last decade; Aleksandra Kedzierska follows and characterizes various types of journeys in Dickens' A Christmas Carol, highlighting their significance for celebration; Alberto Lazaro traces the changes that medieval stories, abundant in sexual references and instances of adultery, have suffered to meet the publication requirements during Franco's regime in Spain; Stephen Tapscott focuses on the relationship between contemporary American poets' lyric and previously written works (especially Modernist); while Fernando Galvan examines a number of literary texts centering on cities that have been dreamed of or imagined by various writers, to illustrate decay, deconstruction and regeneration. The third section, Traveling between Languages and Cultures, opens with Smiljana Komar's account of the translation of some frequent English discourse markers into Slovene and continues with Loredana Punga's illustration of the issue of loss and gain in translation. Irma Taavitsainen and Paivi Pahta highlight the functions of the English politeness marker please, pliis in Finnish, and investigate whether and how its meanings have changed when it has been adopted into the host language. Lachlan Mackenzie's contribution rounds off the volume with some suggestions on how recent changes in the English language should be taken into consideration when teachers of English evaluate the linguistic performance of their students.
About the Author: Luminita Frentiu is a Reader in the English Department at the University of the West, Timisoara, Romania. She specializes in translation studies, pragmatics, discourse analysis and English morphology. Luminita Frentiu is the author of Strategii de comunicare in interactiunea verbala (Timisoara: Editura Mirton, 2000) and Instances of Discourse Analysis (Timisoara: Editura Mirton, 2004), and has brought her contribution to: Dictionar englez-roman de colocatii verbale (edited by Hortensia Parlog and Maria Teleaga; Iasi: Editura Polirom, 2000), The Art and Craft of Translation (edited by Loredana Fratila; Timisoara: Editura Universitatii de Vest, 2009) and to Instant English: English for the Baccalaureate and Entrance Examinations (Iasi: Editura Polirom, 2004), which she also edited, together with Hortensia Parlog and Pia Brinzeu. She has published articles in her fields of expertise, including: Consonant Strategies in Spoken Discourse (Semiotics around the World: Synthesis in Diversity, Berlin, 1998), Pragmatic Instances of Linguistic Humor (From Margin to Center, Iasi, 2000), Referential Processes in Translating Legal and Administrative Texts (The Legacy of History, Vol. 2, Krakow, 2004), Translating Idioms (Cultural Matrix Reloaded, Bucuresti, 2005), When Talk is War: A Metaphor Approach to Election Political Debates (co-author, Codruta Gosa; Romanian Journal of English Studies, Timisoara, 2006). Loredana Punga is a Senior Lecturer in English at the University of the West, Timisoara, Romania. Her domains of expertise are English lexicology, English phonetics and phonology, discourse analysis, sociolinguistics, ESP and translation studies. She is the author of The English Verb Made Easy, (Timisoara: Art Press, 2003), On Language and Ecology (Timisoara: Editura Universitatii de Vest, 2006), English for Students of Kinetotherapy (co-author, Carmen Nedelea; Timisoara: Art Press, 2007), English for Sports and Games (co-author, Carmen Nedelea; Timisoara: Editura Universitatii de Vest, 2010), and Words about Words: An Introduction to English Lexicology (Timisoara: Editura Universitatii de Vest, 2011). Loredana Fratila is editor of The Art and Craft of Translation (Timisoara: Editura Universitatii de Vest, 2009), to which she has also contributed a chapter, and co-editor of Challenges in Translation (Timisoara: Editura Universitatii de Vest, 2010) and Language in Use: The Case of Youth Entertainment Magazines (Newcastle: Cambridge Scholars Publishing, 2010). She is also co-editor of Translationes, a yearly journal in translation studies, published by the University of the West Press. She has published articles in her area of research both in Romanian and abroad.