In 2003, the Nederlandse Taalunie, officially recognised that the Dutch language area is pluricentric with "two equal national varieties" [own translation] (Nederlandse Taalunie 2003) in Europe: Belgian Dutch and Netherlandic Dutch. In reality however, Netherlandic Dutch was the dominant variety. Evidence of this could be found in lexicography, but also in literature and literary translation. Nevertheless, the status of the non-dominant Belgian Dutch variety is changing. This chapter looks at recent changes in lexicography and norm-adherence in Belgium with regard to the use of the Belgian national variety. It illustrates how the attitude towards and the status of non-dominant varieties, just like languages, are in constant flux. This may eventually result in a shift from "asymmetrical pluricentricity" towards more "symmetrical pluricentricity".

Research into children’s audiovisual media often focuses on issues such as the psychological impact of exposure to violence and aggression on children’s behaviour and the influence of media on children’s views on gender, body image and ethnicity. As children are more malleable than adults and, as a result, more vulnerable to such media, its impact can indeed be considerable. The same applies to the influence of the language used in such media on children's linguistic development, since the target audience is still at an early stage of acquiring this (native or foreign) language. However, in many countries, children programmes are mostly imported and, hence, have to be translated. Audiovisual translation research into children’s media is, therefore, arguably even more important. Even in so-called “subtitling countries”, these - mainly dubbed - audiovisual products, but also the language used therein are, thus, worthy of closer scrutiny. With audiovisual translation studies having moved away from purely linguistic analyses, some scholars (Di Giovanni 2011, Pavesi 2018) have - rightfully so - called for a reappraisal of the study of the language of audiovisual translation (without ignoring its multimodality), particularly, in such programmes for children. Children’s programmes have been criticized for being out of touch with reality when it comes to portraying children (e.g. Götz et al. 2018). Many children, therefore, will not recognize themselves or the people around them in the characters they are presented with, but also linguistically such programmes can be out of touch with the linguistic reality in which children live. In this paper, I discuss these diversity issues in children's television and what translation strategies have recently been adopted in Sweden and Belgium to compensate for these on-going issues in children's media.

From its early days, audiovisual translation has often been referred to as constrained translation (Titford, 1982; Mayoral, Kelly & Gallardo, 1988). Skilled audiovisual translators try to find creative solutions to deal with these constraints, yet some might argue inevitably things get lost in translation. However, from a sociolinguistic point of view, there is also a lot to be gained from translation. Especially, in minority and smaller language areas that tend to rely more on imported foreign content. More recently, the emergence of several streaming platforms has started to change the audiovisual media landscape, as well as media consumption and audiovisual translation practices. These content providers are mostly large American companies and they are often feared to flood smaller countries and regions with their American content. Because of this, attempts have been made to protect local markets. Even at EU level, measures are in place to promote European audiovisual media. Importing foreign content can broaden the audience’s horizon, but the importance of making it accessible to a wide range of audiences with different linguistic preferences and special needs is often underrated. As a result, some content providers fail to adequately assess the implications of neglecting parts of their audiences. The impact of audiovisual translation, including dubbing of both local and foreign animation, is often underestimated. In this article, audiovisual translation practice is discussed, explaining sociolinguistic implications focussing on language planning (De Ridder & O'Connell, 2018) and linguistic diversity (De Ridder, 2019; 2020; 2021) in audiovisual content. It aims to raise more awareness of the role audiovisual translation can play and calls for better regulation.

As children are still in the early stages of language acquisition, their exposure to the language used in children’s media may affect their language learning, but also their language attitude. Children’s television has been criticized for being out of touch with reality when it comes to the portrayal of children. However, linguistically children’s media can also be out of touch with reality. This chapter discusses audiovisual media offered by different providers and accessed by young speakers of non-dominant national varieties in pluricentric language areas in the light of ongoing concerns about overexposure to the dominant variety. The main focus is on an analysis of media for Dutch-speaking children in Belgium, but German-language media for Austrian children is also discussed. It highlights differences between local and imported fiction and calls for further sociolinguistic research into the language used in different children’s media and how it affects language learning and language attitude.

This volume deals with language policies and practicesrelating to the linguistic standard used in a range ofdifferent media. It contains research on ten language areas.The aim is to gain a better understanding of such policiesand practices in both original and translated media indifferent pluricentric language areas.

Begin 2019 publiceerde de Taalunie de visietekst over en het implementatieplan voor haar taalvariatiebeleid in de toekomst. Daarin stippelt ze haar taalvariatiebeleid uit. Dit implementatieplan is het vervolg op de beleidstekst uit 2003, waarin de Taalunie het idee van de monocentrische standaardtaal definitief inruilde voor een pluricentrische standaardtaal. Sindsdien bestaan er ‘natiolecten’: geaccepteerde varianten van de standaardtaal die in een bepaalde natie (Nederland, België, Suriname en de Caraïben) gebruikelijk zijn. In het nieuwe implementatieplan stelt de Taalunie dat de variatie binnen de standaardtaal al wordt beschreven en dat die lopende projecten zullen worden ‘voortgezet en – waar mogelijk – worden geïntensiveerd of uitgebreid’. Taalvariatie in het werkveld Wij vroegen ons af of taalprofessionals zoals vertalers, redacteurs, tekstschrijvers en taaldocenten in de praktijk te maken krijgen met die variatie, welke naslagwerken ze gebruiken en welke informatie ze op dit moment niet of moeilijk kunnen vinden. Uit onze enquêteresultaten blijkt dat bij het werkveld, de mensen die professioneel en praktisch met taal bezig zijn, een grote behoefte aan degelijke naslagwerken en voldoende informatie over regionale informatie bestaat. Met andere woorden: de corpusplanning uit het implementatieplan mag zeker nog hoog op de agenda van de Taalunie blijven staan.

Rond de eeuwwisseling erkende de Nederlandse Taalunie dat het Nederlands een pluricentrische taal is met een Nederlandse en een Belgische nationale variëteit. Daarna werden ook Surinaamse en Caribische variëteiten erkend. Belgische Nederlandstaligen en taalprofessionals hielden zich in het verleden grotendeels aan de Nederlands-Nederlandse norm.  

Met de officiële erkenning van het Belgisch-Nederlands kregen taalgebruikers geleidelijk aan meer vertrouwen in het gebruik van hun eigen nationale variëteit. Enkele studies trachtten op basis van een systematische lexicale analyse na te gaan of beide variëteiten naar elkaar toe groeiden of net uit elkaar groeiden. Veel Nederlands-Nederlands werd in België overgenomen door de verwoede taalplanningsinitiatieven uit het verleden om de Nederlands-Nederlandse variëteit te promoten. Toch wordt er nog steeds een aanzienlijk aantal gemarkeerde Belgisch-Nederlandse woorden gebruikt in België, waarvan de Nederlandse tegenhangers om de een of andere reden nooit echt ingang hebben gevonden in dit deel van het taalgebied. Deze bijdrage blikt terug op het onderzoek van Grondelaers et al. uit 2001 en de vervolgstudie van Daems et al. uit 2015 en zoomt in op het gebruik van een deel van de kledingterminologie vandaag. Maar we bekijken ook andere manieren om de lexicale variatie in het Nederlands te bestuderen. Dat doen we door zelf taalgebruikers te bevragen en door taalgebruik te analyseren in corpora. Deze bijdrage pleit ook voor verder onderzoek naar de Nederlandse natiolectismen en een betere beschrijving van de Nederlandse natiolecten in het algemeen.

This book deals with two research fields and brings them together: contrastive linguistics and third language acquisition. The book describes the following linguistic structures in Dutch and Swedish from a contrastive perspective: spatial adverbs, copula, impersonal passives, impersonal constructions and finally the posture verbs stand, zit and lie. Dutch and Swedish are usually acquired as a third language and not as a second language, which implies that learners already comprehend various other languages. When learning a language these multilingual learners have developed certain strategies which draw on their competence in earlier studied languages. In the process of learning a third language, metalinguistic and cross-linguistic awareness play an important role. Comparing linguistic structures in two closely related languages as Dutch and Swedish can enhance cross-linguistic awareness and therefore be used as a didactic tool.

The contribution deals with third language acquisition and metalinguistic awareness in relation to Swedish and Dutch. The use of posture verbs in the above-mentioned languages is outlined to exemplify the outcome of focusing on metalinguistic awareness in language acquisition as a didactic tool. The contribution will discuss the set up and results of a cloze test taken by Swedish-speaking learners of Dutch, which measures the accurate use of posture verbs.

This article aims at looking into the acquisition of the Dutch posture verbs staan 'stand', zitten 'sit' and liggen 'lie' by learners of Dutch at Stockholm University and Helsinki University. Firstly, this study presents a systematic semantic description which gives an outline of the uses of the Dutch posture verbs based on categories originating from Lemmens & Perrez (2010) and De Knop & Perrez (2014). Secondly, a pilot study was conducted consisting of two cloze tests to see whether this semantic description can enhance the acquistiton of these particular verbs. Finally, we discuss the outcome of the two cloze tests taken by the Swedish-speaking and Finnish-speaking learners at the universities mentioned above. This part of the article also takes crosslinguistic awareness and CLIL (content and language integrated learning) into consideration as didactic tools when learning a third language.

This paper deals with impersonal passives in two Germanic languages, Swedish and Dutch. Impersonal passives constitute one type of impersonal construction (denoting constructions with non-canonical subjects) as described in Siewierska ( 2008a : 116). Formally, they consist of an overt expletive subject, such as det ‘it’ in Swedish and er ‘there’ in Dutch, combined with a passive predicate. Semantically, such passive constructions encode actions with a general reference, i.e. where no agent is specified (cf. Siewierska 1984 , Engdahl 2006 , Viberg 2010 ). The study is corpus-based and uses a bidirectional translation corpus of Swedish and Dutch to map out the specific morphosyntactic and semantic profile of the impersonal passive in both Swedish and in Dutch. The similarities and differences make these languages suitable to study from a contrastive perspective in that interesting aspects on impersonal passives are highlighted in the translation data.

Analog bulletin boards are omnipresent in Swedish urban areas, yet little systematic knowledge about this communication medium exists. In the shadow of the rapid emergence of digital media the analog bulletin board has received less attention than its digital successors, many of them having incorporated similar functionality with novel technical solutions. In this study we used a citizen science method to collect 1167 messages from bulletin boards around Sweden aided by school children and teachers, with the purpose of shedding new light on what is communicated on the boards, by whom, using what types of technologies and in what way the messages refer to other media. Results show that the most common messages are invitations to events, such as concerts, lectures and sports events, followed by buy-and-sell ads for goods and services. The most frequent sender is an association, for example NGOs, sports associations or religious communities. Almost half of the sampled messages were professionally printed, about forty per cent were made by home printers. Only six per cent of the messages were handwritten, almost exclusively by private persons as senders. Moreover, we show how the analog bulletin board has adapted to recent changes in media technology-a media landscape which is saturated with electronicand mobile media. Further, the bulletin board still holds a firm place in a media ecology where local communication is in demand, and exists in parallel with electronic media. Close to forty percent of the messages contained hyperlinks to web pages and we found (and removed for anonymization purposes) more than six hundred phone numbers from the dataset.

In this case study four non-fiction books are being accompanied on their way from the Netherlands to the public in Sweden, that is from one peripheral language into another. Where did the initiative come from? Were there any subsidies and did that matter? What kind of publishers were involved and were there also other agents involved? Who were the most important cultural mediators? How were the books framed in order to be noticed in the new country? How does all this fit in with the sociological theory of transnational cultural transfer?

It turned out that these books more or less followed the expected path with a few exceptions: Two of the books were published by large-scale publishers in Sweden although they had not proved to be successful in the Netherlands. And there were no signs of regular co-operation between the involved publishers. Obviously the translated Dutch books in Sweden are such a marginal business for these publishers that they do not influence their network of foreign publishers. 

Even if all four books belong to the same genre, they are very differently framed to be noticed in their new country. 

This essay studies how proper names in The Fellowship of the Ring by J.R.R. Tolkien are translated into Dutch and Afrikaans through the theoretical framework of Descriptive Translation Studies. The names are collected in a three-language corpus study and then categorised by type of name and translation strategy as described by Jan Van Coillie (2006). The results from the two translations are then compared and presented with a few illustrative examples from both translations. The results from the analysis show that the Afrikaans translation is more target culture-oriented than the Dutch translation and that the Afrikaans translation contains less consistent translation solutions.

This paper gives an account of the impersonal passive in Dutch and Swedish and has two goals: first, to define the impersonal passive and second, to offer a corpus-based study of impersonal passives in both languages. Impersonal passives are defined as passive constructions encoding actions with a general reference. They are made up of an overt expletive subject, viz. er ‘there’ in Dutch and det ‘it’ in Swedish, combined with a passive predicate. A contrastive study of the impersonal passive gives a wider and in-depth analysis of this structure in both languages by applying knowledge from two grammatical traditions. The empirical part of the study reveals that impersonal passives occur more frequently in Dutch than in Swedish. Moreover, the empirical data show that elements such as telicity, transitivity and control come into play in an interesting way in impersonal passives.

This thesis examines how spoken language in the Dutch children's books Krassen in het tafelblad and Ik ben Polleke hoor! has been translated into Swedish. The analysis is done according to the descriptive translation studies’ theory of translation norms, and spoken language expressions are analyzed by using Lindqvist's (2005) classification of spoken language markers on three levels: the phonological/ morphological level, the lexical level and the syntactic level. The survey shows the translation strategies used by the translators and the norms that may have had an impact during the translation process. The result shows that the spoken language in Krassen in het tafelblad is more freely translated than the spoken language in the translation of Ik ben Polleke hoor!. Both translations show an ambition to fit within their target culture, but Krassen in het tafelblad lies closer to an acceptance-oriented translation than Ik ben Polleke hoor!, that adheres more to the source text and can be seen as a more adequate-oriented translation.

This article deals with the Swedish translation of Annie M. G. Schmidt’s novel Minoes (1970). In order to position Schmidt within the literary field of the targetculture, initially similarities between Schmidt and Swedish postwar children’s literature authors such as Lennart Hellsing and Astrid Lindgren are explored. Within earlier research Schmidt is often called ‘the Dutch Astrid Lindgren’ and indeed many resemblances between the works of both authors can be noticed, e.g. withregards to child images and literary style and expression. Furthermore Lindgren,for many years working as an editor for children’s literature at Rabén & Sjögren,functioned as a cultural transmitter or ‘gatekeeper’ and played a direct role in the early introduction of Schmidt in Sweden in the 1950s. In spite of this Minoes was first translated in 1989, one year after Schmidt got rewarded the prestigious H.C.Andersen price.

The translation analysis in this article focusses mainly on the Swedish translation of proper names and place names, both in the book and in the film version. In the book these are mainly translated with target culture-oriented strategies providing dynamic equivalent counterparts for the names adhering to meanings and connotations expressed in the source text but also functional within the target culture. The film version was introduced in Sweden in 2003 but here no references are made to the book. Names remain more unchanged in the dubbed Swedish version which at the same time coheres with the Swedish subtitling, also used for the Dutch spoken version of the film. Only small adaptions, mainly for purposes of pronunciation are made.

Although the book got good reviews, Schmidt never really obtained a central or stable position in the Swedish literary system. This is further confirmed by the fact that the film version in Sweden in no way is connected to the book which was not republished in connection to the film.

This chapter focuses on the recontextualization of images and the translation of simultaneous action expressed multimodally in picture book translations. It analyzes several spreads from the globally translated and distributed picture books about Grandpa Pettson and Findus by Swedish author-illustrator Sven Nordqvist and compares their French and Dutch translations using a social semiotic multimodal text analysis examining both words and images. Within the theoretical framework of social semiotics, but also drawing on central thoughts within Descriptive Translation Studies, the authors see translation and the act of translating as motivated by and within its specific social and situational context, depending on the signs that are culturally available within this context. The results of the analyses show that the translated picture books about Pettson and Findus can be described as ‘glocal’ artefacts, combining globally spread images with new meaning depending on the local choices made in the different translations, in this case as expressed through the depiction of simultaneous action.