#4067. The development of L2 sociolinguistic competence in translation trainees: an accommodation-based longitudinal study into the acquisition of sensitivity to grammatical (in)formality in English

October 2026publication date
Proposal available till 16-06-2025
4 total number of authors per manuscript5500 $

The title of the journal is available only for the authors who have already paid for
Journal’s subject area:
Language and Linguistics;
Linguistics and Language;
Education;
or another
Places in the authors’ list:
place 1place 2place 3place 4
FreeFreeFreeFree
2350 $1200 $1050 $900 $
Contract №4067.1 Contract №4067.2 Contract №4067.3 Contract №4067.4
1 place - free (for sale)
2 place - free (for sale)
3 place - free (for sale)
4 place - free (for sale)

Abstract:
As expert intercultural communicators, translators constantly face the challenges of comprehending and producing language that is stylistically appropriate in various communicative contexts. Using style-based grammaticality judgement tasks, we collected data from 21 undergraduate trainees over a three-year period. We asked participants to revise sentences for style and investigated their accommodative competence in L2 English. We looked at participants’ ability to accommodate language to social context through style-shifting, mapping how they detected and/or corrected (in)appropriateness in formal contexts. Our results show that trainees’ overall accommodative competence initially improves, but subsequently stagnates. In the final year of testing, they barely score 50%. Receptive and productive sensitivity to grammatical (in)appropriateness follow similar developments, with trainees consistently performing better for receptive than for productive sensitivity. Our findings highlight the need to design effective sociolinguistically responsive (foreign-language) instruction in translation training to further develop sensitivity to grammatical (in)formality.
Keywords:
(in)formality; accommodative/sociolinguistic competence; grammaticality judgements; L2 English; translation training

Contacts :
0