This paper is an attempt to provide some possible reasons why students lack motivation to learn English for Specific Purposes (ESP) at three Lithuanian educational institutions: Vilnius University (VU), Mykolas Romeris University (MRU) and International School of Law and Business (ISLB). 97 full-time students from different study programmes took part in the research: Mathematics, Information Technologies (VU), Tourism and Hotel Administration, Visual Communication (ISLB), Social Work, Communication and Creative Industries, and Psychology (MRU). The questions to determine the level of motivation were compiled based on motivation researcher’s Zoltán Dörnyei’s book Motivational Strategies in the Language Classroom (2001). Zoltán Dörnyei groups the factors influencing students’ motivation to learn into three levels: learner level, language level (culture and community) and learning situation level. In this research it was decided to find out how timetable, marks, oral evaluations, difficult tasks, other people, knowledge from school encourage or discourage the respondents to study. Based on the results lecturers can try to alter their behaviour and activities in the classroom so that students do not lose their motivation in the course of studies. The results do not reveal any major differences among the two universities (VU and MRU) and one university of applied sciences (ISLB). Students are less motivated if they do not see clearly how they can apply their knowledge and skills in the future or are discouraged from learning by weaker knowledge brought from school.

Conjunctions are one type of discourse relational devices and their translation may depend not only on their semantic meaning but also on the pragmatic functions they perform. Conjunctions carry semantic meaning which may overlap or intertwine with the pragmatic function or conjunctions may simply demonstrate their pragmatic behaviour. Various scholars group conjunctions and discourse relational devices in different ways, while the authors analyse adversative conjunctions (according to Halliday and Hasan’s (1976) classification) in spoken Lithuanian and English. The paper researches how the most frequent English adversative conjunctions but and yet (Rudolph, 1996) are translated into Lithuanian and what might determine one or another translator’s preference. Corpus-based comparative discourse analysis is carried out, using the English-Lithuanian part of the parallel corpus compiled by Vytautas Magnus University. In different languages different variations of conjunctions are used to ensure discourse relations and the differences become even more visible if the translations of the connectives (conjunctions) are compared (Degand, Zufferey, 2013). It was established by the research that translations of the conjunctions vary, they may be translated by the conjunctions provided by dictionaries, or, taking into consideration their pragmatic function, might be transferred into a different linguistic category like particles or adverbs or are simply omitted. However, such strategies as omission or paraphrasing are not an easy choice for a translator, as they may imply a slight change of the meaning. The most frequent translations coincide with the meanings provided by dictionaries.

Straipsnyje nagrinėjama studentų motyvacija, jos įtaka mokymo/si procesui bei mokomoji veikla, kuri paskatintų nuolatinių studijų studentus lankyti specialybės anglų kalbos paskaitas. Siekiant išsiaiškinti, kuo sudominti studentus, buvo atliktas kiekybinis tyrimas. Straipsnyje pateikiama teorinės medžiagos analizė apie motyvacijos rūšis, apie metodus, padedančius sukurti tinkamą atmosferą ir sąlygas, reikalingus sėkmingiems rezultatams pasiekti. Tyrimo duomenys atskleidė, kad kai kurie studentai yra labiau motyvuojami išorinių motyvų, tokių kaip geras pažymys, papildomi taškai, diplomo gavimas, geresnės karjeros galimybės. Tačiau yra ir tokių, kurie dalyvauja veikloje dėl to, kad pati veikla jiems patinka (vidinė motyvacija), o tai lemia geresnius rezultatus. Todėl specialybės užsienio kalbos dėstytojai turėtų visada stengtis surasti veiklos, skatinančios studentus užsimiršti, jog jie mokosi.

The core aim is to study how the American writer O. Henry depicts women and men in his short stories and how his attitude towards them was rendered while translating these stories into Georgian and Lithuanian. Secondly, the reasons of choosing one or another strategy of rendering certain concepts will be justified and compared between the two target languages. Moreover, some cultural aspects that manifest themselves in the stories are discussed. The methods applied for this work are descriptive, contrastive and analytical. Having these purposes in mind, two stories “The Gift of the Magi” and “Witch’s Loaves” were taken as examples of O. Henry’s creation and they have been analysed paying attention to the same aspects in both Georgian and Lithuanian target texts. These stories illustrate typical hard-working men and delicate women at the turn of the century. The authors of this paper aim to investigate if various translation strategies applied (generalization, specification, omission or even changes) add value to the target texts; create a similar or totally different image of what was originally meant by the author. Consequently, it is possible to conclude that O. Henry is not easy to be translated since even the smallest details convey the author’s attitude towards his heroes. Changing them or not paying appropriate attention may result in the loss of meaning while translating the texts from one language to another. The main reasons for the changes or modifications made by the translators are cultural, stylistic (specific to a certain language) or grammatical.