Sabbatical Heidi Verplaetse: Applied study of modality in science/health communication and advisory texts, and linguistic focus points in translation assessment

During the sabbatical period, I plan to continue the line of research I have developed over recent years regarding translation quality based on error analyzes of student translations. Specifically, I aim to explore and add linguistic focus points for error analysis. I would also like to elaborate preparations for research into translation processes among students. Interdisciplinary points of contact with colleagues between research into translation products and processes on the one hand and research on writing skills can also be explored in this context. Besides the addition of linguistic focus points for analysis of translation quality, I also plan to further develop the linguistic domain of the modality. For this I especially want to start already further develop research on epistemic modality and related concepts as an expression of different degrees of certainty about innovative scientific ideas in historical science communication. In the linguistic domain of modality, I also plan further applied research on the interplay between epistemic modality (degree of certainty) and deontic modality (commandment / prohibition / advice / admission) in different text types, especially health communication and official travel advice. I would like to take advantage of the sabbatical period to further acquire some methodological resources and functionalities, in particular (specialised) corpora, corpustools and statistical techniques for data analysis. Finally, I would also like to start exploring the phenomenon of English as a lingua franca, in general and especially with regard to the research domains mentioned above. At the start of my career as an Anglist, English was still mainly a 'second language' or a 'foreign language'. Due to increasing globalization, English has meanwhile acquired the status of 'lingua franca', for example as a language of science, but also for population groups whose mother tongue is not English, but who nevertheless rely on English for social functions such as health care. This raises questions for areas of application from my research domains and teaching assignment.