No abstract

No abstract

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 study concerns the changing and variable agreement patterns with twenty-one lowfrequency collective nouns (e.g. trio) in British English. The data come from the 1990 and 2000 CD-ROM editions of The Independent. The token frequencies of nouns do not appear to affect the preference for singular verb agreement. There are, however, clear differences between noun types, as is typical for lexical diffusion. Most nouns have developed a strong preference for singular verb agreement, some remain variable, and some prefer the plural. Many of the agreement patterns for individual nouns can be motivated with reference to the characteristics of the nouns rather than to the semantics of the verbs. This investigation found no evidence that singular verb agreement, which is argued in this study to be the unmarked alternative, is generally on the increase. Rather it seems that nouns which prefer plural verbs continue to move towards plural agreement.

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.