The present study concerns English hyphenated premodifiers translated into German and Swedish. The material was collected from the fiction part of the English–Swedish Parallel Corpus and the Oslo Multilingual Corpus, and includes almost 700 instances of translations into both German and Swedish, as well as 500 instances each of translations from German and Swedish into English. In the material, hyphenated premodifiers come in many different forms. However, they are mostly short, often containing nominal heads (head-office (man)), ed-participles (water-filled (ditches)) or adjectives (gray-green (tweed)), and only a few are longer, creative hapaxes ((her) “take-me-seriously-or-I’ll-sue-you” (demeanor)). The translations into English contain less variation than English originals, as predicted by translation theory. When the premodifiers are translated into German and Swedish they are often restructured, and only half are translated into German and Swedish premodifiers. German and Swedish premodifying compound adjectives/participles are the most frequent equivalents of English hyphenated premodifiers. More complex English premodifiers are often rendered as postmodifiers in German and Swedish. As could be expected from the preferred noun-phrase structures in German and Swedish, German translations have a (slightly) stronger preference for premodification (e.g., the all-embracing unit → die alles umschließende Einheit), while Swedish (slightly) more often uses postmodifying clauses and prepositional phrases (fifteen-year-old schoolgirls → skolflickor i femtonårsåldern). German and Swedish postmodifiers are very rarely translated into English hyphenated premodifiers.
This article concerns English proper noun modifiers denoting organizations, people and places and their German and Swedish correspondences. It supplements previous studies touching upon contrastive comparisons by providing large-scale systematic findings on the translation correspondences of the three aforementioned semantic types. The data are drawn from the Linnaeus University English–German–Swedish Corpus (LEGS), which contains popular non-fiction, a genre previously not studied in connection with proper noun modifiers. The results show that organization-based modifiers are the most common and person-based ones the rarest in English originals. Compounds are the most frequent correspondences in German and Swedish translations and originals with genitives and prepositional phrases as other common options. The preference for compounds is stronger in German, while it is stronger for prepositional phrases in Swedish translations, reflecting earlier findings on language-specific tendencies. Organization-based modifiers tend to be translated into compounds, and place-based modifiers into prepositional phrases. German and Swedish translators relatively often opt for similar target-language structures. Two important target-language differences emerge: (i) compounds with complex heads are dispreferred in Swedish (US news show > *USA-nyhetsprogram) but unproblematic in German (US-Nachrichtensendung), and (ii) compounds with acronyms (WTO ruling > WTO-Entscheidung) are more frequent in German.
This paper presents findings on the use of brackets in original texts and translations based on the Linnaeus University English-German-Swedish corpus (LEGS). The results show that in originals, brackets are the most frequent in English and the least in Swedish. Translations usually contain more brackets than originals. There are two reasons for this. First, most brackets are retained, and secondly, many are added. Added brackets mostly contain short synonyms facilitating target-reader comprehension. English translators introduce the most changes (additions, omissions, downgrades and upgrades), and Swedish ones the least. Brackets tend to fulfil content-oriented rather than interpersonal functions. When brackets are replaced by other punctuations marks in translations, these tend to be commas or no punctuation marks at all. German originals have a stronger preference for bracketing phrases than clauses compared to English and Swedish. These German phrasal brackets are often expanded into clauses in translations.
Das Thema dieses Beitrags ist die Übersetzung deutscher Partizipialkonstruktionen ins Schwedische – ein Thema, dem die bisherige Forschung kaum Aufmerksamkeit geschenkt hat. Die Studie ist sowohl quantitativer als auch qualitativer Natur. Als Korpus dienen deutsche Sachprosatexte und ihre schwedischen Übersetzungen, von denen anzunehmen ist, dass sie im Einklang mit den entsprechenden deutschen beziehungsweise schwedischen Gebrauchsnormen verfasst wurden, eher als dass sie einen spezifischen Autorenstil reflektieren. Anhand der quantitativen Analyse wird untersucht, ob und inwiefern eine Korrelation zwischen dem Subtyp der Partizipialkonstruktion und der gewählten Übersetzungsstrategie besteht. Ausgehend von den intuitiven Annahmen der einschlägigen Literatur wäre in den schwedischen Übersetzungen ein größerer Anteil an finiten Strukturen zu erwarten, die zur semantischen und syntaktischen Explizierung führen könnten. Das Ergebnis der Studie zeigt allerdings, dass die Übersetzer im hohen Ausmaß nach Strukturerhalt streben. Als frequenteste Übersetzungsstrategie kann die Verwendung einer entsprechenden Partizipialkonstruktion belegt werden, aber auch das strukturerhaltende Adjektiv stellt eine häufig vorkommende Strategie dar. Für die Strategienwahl spielt in der Tat der Subtyp der Partizipialkonstruktion eine Rolle, vor allem im Hinblick auf deren Komplexität. So werden Partizipialkonstruktionen in der schwedischen Übersetzung viel öfter verwendet, wenn der Originaltext eine einfache Partizipialkonstruktion aufweist. Dagegen sind finite Strukturen viel häufiger bei der Übersetzung von erweiterten Konstruktionen. Vorangestellte Partizipialattribute werden dabei oft durch einen Relativsatz wiedergegeben und die freistehenden adverbialen Partizipialkonstruktionen nicht selten durch Hauptsatzstrukturen.
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