A qualitative study was carried out to survey attitudes towards and feelings associated with verbal irony among gelotophobes and nongelotophobes (gelotophobia denoting the fear of being laughed at). Sixty-one people (13 gelotophobes) were surveyed using an open-ended online questionnaire. An inductive, manifest content analysis was carried out. The analysis distinguished that non-gelotophobes treat verbal irony as a skillful way of drawing attention to absurdity. Irony was also often seen as a personal quality rather than a linguistic form. Concerns with recognizing irony appeared very rarely. In contrast, the gelotophobes’ responses displayed a more negative and one-sided attitude towards irony, describing it mostly as a way to put down and insult. These findings, though obtained in a general exploration, present a perspective complementary to that seen in linguistic and psycholinguistic literature as they draw attention to matters of personal experience of irony use. Additionally, the study’s methodological limitations and further directions for research are discussed.

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.