This research analyzes the media discourse on racism in football in Germany. The main goal of this paper is to find linguistic patterns that should reflect the way in which racist behavior is related to the immigrant background of certain football players. For this purpose, several media texts were selected that describe cases in which some German football players were exposed to racism, such as Jérôme Boateng, Mesut Özil and Gerald Asamoah. These three show different contexts that encouraged racist behavior towards them, but all three cases could be summed up by Mesut Özil’s sentence: “German when we win, immigrant when we lose”. The methodology applied in this work is based on the linguistic analysis of the discourse. This approach has especially developed among German linguists who believe that discourse analysis should be conducted exclusively on the basis of the language itself and linguistic patterns, and that conclusions are drawn only on the basis of what is linguistically realized.

This article discusses the use of prepositions zbog and radi in the Bosnian language as translation equivalents of the German preposition wegen based on a selected literary corpus. It is often the case in everyday speech that the difference in the meaning between these two prepositions is not noticed and often not understood by the native speakers of the Bosnian language. However, this sometimes also happens in the literary language, i.e., in the translation of literature, to which this paper pays attention. The starting point for the contrastive analysis between the two languages is the use of the preposition wegen in the prepositional phrase functioning as an adverb phrase in German, when it shows several nuances of meaning. Namely, the primary meaning of the preposition wegen is causal, but it is also used with the meaning of goal or intention. Consequently, in the translation to the Bosnian language we follow the difference in the use of the preposition zbog with the meaning of cause and radi with the meaning of goal or intention. Keywords: prepositions, meaning of prepositions, genitive case, prepositional-case phrase, position of the preposition, contrastive analysis.