Language for Specific Purposes (PDF)

This volume brings together work by both well-known scholars and emerging researchers in the various areas of Language for Specific Purposes (LSP), such as political, legal, medical, and business discourse. The volume is divided into three parts in order to align rather than separate three different but related aspects of LSP: namely, translation, linguistic research, and domain specific communication on the web. Underlying all the contributions here is the growing awareness of the ever-increasing multiformity of specialised communication and the ever-wider social implications of the communicative situations in which it is embedded, especially where it involves the need to move across languages, cultures and modes, as in translation and interpreting. The contributions consistently bear witness to the need to review received notions, pose new questions, and explore fresh perspectives. The picture that emerges is one of extreme complexity, in which researchers into specifically linguistic aspects of LSPs and their translation across languages and media declare their awareness of the pressing need to come to terms with a wide range of social, pragmatic, intercultural and political factors, above and beyond socio-technical knowledge of the domains under investigation.