Contrastive analysis: selected lexemes related to epidemic phenomena in Polish, Chinese and English

Abstract

This work presents a comparative study of the linguistic images of epidemic phenomena in Polish, Chinese and English. It compares four groups of words selected by the author: epidemia – 流行病 (liú xíng bìng ) / 疫情 (yì qíng)  / 瘟疫 (wēn yì) – epidemic, kwarantanna – 隔离 (gé lí) – quarantine, szczepić – 接种 (jiē zhǒng) / 打预防针 (dá yù fáng zhēn) – to vaccinate / to inoculate / to immunize oraz zarazić – 传染 (chuán rán) / 感染 (gǎn rǎn) – to infect. The study not only compares the prototypical meanings of these words, but also explores their connotations in different cultural contexts. The author collected material from dictionaries, corpuses, and press articles of the three languages, and used authorial translations to analyze the data. This analysis provides a new perspective on the epidemic and also highlights some relationships between the compared languages, which are typologically distant from each other. The study is useful for glottodidactic and translation practices.