Foreign credit: travel writing and authenticity in the dutch translation of The memoirs and travels of Mauritius Augustus, Count de Benyowsky (1790)

This article explores the translation and reception of the Memoirs and Travels (1790) of Count Mauritius Augustus Benyowsky (1746-86) in the Netherlands, and examines the complications, tensions and problems that transfer between a major and a more minor European language involves. I analyse how the Dutch translator Petrus Loosjes Adriaanszoon positioned himself as a mediator between these very different source and target cultures and ask how he dealt with the problems of plausibility and ‘credit’ which had beleaguered the reception of the Memoirs and Travels from the outset. In this article I am concerned to restore minority languages to the discussion of how travel literature circulated in Western Europe at the close of the eighteenth century and to demonstrate how major/minor language translation was central to the construction of Dutch-language culture in the Low Countries in this period.

Learning to think in a second language: effects of proficiency and length of exposure in English learners of German

The aim of the current study is to investigate motion event cognition in second language learners in a higher education learning context. Based on recent findings showing that speakers of grammatical aspect languages like English attend less to the endpoint (goal) of events than speakers of non-aspect languages like Swedish in a nonverbal categorization task involving working memory (Athanasopoulos & Bylund, 2013; Bylund & Athanasopoulos, this issue), the current study asks whether native speakers of an aspect language start paying more attention to event endpoints when learning a non-aspect language. Native English and German (a non-aspect language) speakers, and English learners of L2 German, who were pursuing studies in German language and literature at an English university, were asked to match a target scene with intermediate degree of endpoint orientation with two alternate scenes with low and high degree of endpoint orientation, respectively. Results showed that, when compared to the native English speakers, the learners of German were more prone to base their similarity judgements on endpoint saliency, rather than ongoingness, primarily as a function of increasing L2 proficiency and year of university study. Further analyses revealed a non-linear relationship between length of L2 exposure and categorization patterns, subserved by a progressive strengthening of the relationship between L2 proficiency and categorization as length of exposure increased. These findings present evidence that cognitive restructuring may occur through increasing experience with an L2, but also suggest that this relationship may be complex, and unfold over a long period of time.