"Wörter, die Geschmack (aber auch Geruch) haben". Zur Perzeption von Sprache bei Lese- und Übersetzungsprozessen im universitären DaF-Kontext

In foreign language teaching geared towards the principles of multilingualism, interculturality and contrastive approaches, translation emerges in a new light, in that it is not used as a sterile grammar-translation method, but is brought to fruition in the formation of key qualifications such as intercultural and symbolic competences. Against this backdrop, the article will present an empirical project conducted with MA students in German studies at the University of Catania. The study focused on the question of how students perceive the literariness of intercultural or transcultural literary texts and the aesthetic effect of their literary interculturality with the aim of overcoming the symbolic gap between the languages in the source texts and in the translations that they produced or that have been officially published. Within the framework of a reception/perception study, data were compiled using introspective methods, which are intended to provide insights not only into the development of cognitive aspects such as language and cultural awareness, but also into linguistic sensitization processes triggered by dealing with linguistic hybridity and ambiguity. The paper will also present some results that will shed light on the development of symbolic competence.