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This paper revisits the translational practices of Dominican missionaries who worked in multilingual settings in the Guatemalan highlands in the colonial period. It is argued that the missionaries developed the emerging ideas of European Renaissance linguistics and applied methods of contrastive linguistics to indigenous languages long before this discipline came into being. The main argument derives from an 18th-century collection of missionary writings in Q'eqchi' and Poqomchi', two Mayan languages spoken in Guatemala. An uncommon phrase-by-phrase alignment of bilingual texts allows for the assumption that a contrastive approach to genetically related languages could be the underlying principle in language learning and translation at that time. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This essay analyzes a corpus of university student writing samples, in particular some e-mail messages sent by Spanish- and Italian-speaking students to their teachers. We reflected upon L2 pragmatics teaching and learning and upon the importance of the study of linguistic politeness, which should be part of language and culture learning. Our aim is to provide samples of a currently very popular discursive practice, without venturing into generalizations. Our objective is to teach students to communicate in Spanish as L2, taking into account the cultural context and the implicit pragmatic rules governing language use, which often cause misunderstandings. Spanish and Italian and typologically similar languages which nonetheless significantly differ, for example, at the pragmatic level. Therefore, a contrastive approach, especially in this case, is a valuable teaching tool to encourage students to conscientious language learning (Calvi 1995: 161). [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]