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.