While most traffic signs in Europe are purely pictorial, some also employ text. The article discusses two-code (image plus text) traffic signs on examples from a few countries: the UK, Germany, the US, the Netherlands, France, Belgium and Poland. Special emphasis is placed on various possible sense relations between text and image in such signs. In some of these relations (such as intersemiotic translation or emphasis) the text does not modify the meaning of the image, whereas in others (such as restriction, complementation or elaboration) it does. Drivers who do not know the local language, however, are neither able to understand the text nor to determine its function towards image. Therefore, the text is always prone to affect them negatively.

The article offers a discourse-analytic examination of original (English) and interpreted (Polish) versions of several extracts from plenary speeches by three Members of the European Parliament (Janusz Korwin-Mikke, Nigel Farage and Guy Verhofstadt). Controversial statements that have met with adverse reactions of the audience and/or the media are selected for analysis. The author endeavours to assess the degree to which pragmatic equivalence has been achieved by Polish interpreters. Another pertinent question is whether the identifi ed shifts are due to some systemic differences between the pragmatics of the source and target languages or to other factors, such as the constraints typical for simultaneous interpreting or specific, local problems.

The communication aspect of cross-border healthcare and translation and interpreting in this field are under-researched. This paper presents the results of a qualitative webpage content analysis of the multilingual websites of three Viennese abortion clinics. We investigate if and how content affected by a social and cultural taboo is (re)framed linguistically in versions addressed at patients from Poland, where abortion has been largely illegal since 1993. Our results show that awareness of the need for comprehensive target group-oriented information provision and quality translation and/or adaptation varies and that the Polish websites in our corpus tend to adopt a slightly different, more feminist and pro-choice point-of-view in comparison to the German versions.