Using the translation of Isabel Allende's novel "The House of the Spirits," this essay demonstrates that the mastery of a foreign language does not guarantee a translation true to the original. The Spanish of the Latin American countries exhibits numerous differences and does not always share a uniform vocabulary. Concrete measures are…

This study reports on preliminary findings of two research projects conducted during the 1988-89 and 1990-91 in Cordoba, Argentina, that examined fixed, idiomatic, Spanish-language expressions that are very common, but often ignored, in oral Spanish discourse. Study 1 subjects were 13 university-educated, adults, born in the city; study 2 subjects…

Fluent Spanish-English bilinguals were asked to translate passages containing idioms into everyday conversational English. Results confirmed the use of knowledge of English to produce many idioms and the production of more idioms that were identical in both languages. (Contains 20 references.) (Author/LB)

Fourteen articles are presented in this volume on contrastive linguistics. The articles and authors are as follows: "A Brief Falsificationist Look at Contrastive Sociolinguistics" (K. Janicki); "The Locus of French Gender Control" (W. A. Bennett); "On the English Perfect Tense and Current Relevance Implicatures" (J.…

These two issues of the journal "CLAVE" contain these articles in Spanish with one article in English: "La ensenanza de la lingua materna" (Pablo Arnaez); "Saben resumir los alumnos universitarios de nuevo ingreso?" (Marisol Garcia); "El desempeno en la escritura de cartas argumentativas y cuentos en alumnos de octavo grado" (Yolanda Perez, Maria…